Re: Can we lower the LD entry cost please (part 1)?

Hi Yves,
Thank you for the response.
Yes, you are right - when we have taken over the world, there will be powerful systems to help us do this, and I can be a happy little data provider, while others provide my search and linkage.
But when we try to tell people that we have this wonderful resource called Musicbrainz, which is part of the amazing LOD cloud, (I think I saw evidence of such a talk recently), what experience do the excited listeners get when they go away and try to join?
After quite a lot of work they will have concluded, at best, that this is system infrastructure for gurus, and so they can do a bit of browsing a bit like wikipedia but not as pleasant, and it is not relevant to them.
I have just failed to find Telemann on Musicbrainz, I'm afraid, (musicbrainz.org or Sindice) although I only spent a few minutes - but why so hard?
Perhaps all I wanted to do was use his URI to identify him unambiguously, using a little tool that lets me say I (dis)like his music, but it is just so hard.
OK, maybe my sort of use case is not what the community cares about - so be it, but I think I should be able to do it, and do it now.
These sort of links are really valuable - there might not be so many of them, but they can carry a lot of information.
I can tell you we have over 1M links to the dblp world from rkbexplorer, but since the data is substantially the same, I don't consider them as valuable.
On the other hand, we have 174 links from nsf to cordis and 183 the other way - now that is value. How did we create them? By a lot of work, and the ability to search.

So I agree in principle with your view of separating out these things.
But I don't think we have the time, and while we fail to deliver this, possible recruits are turning away.
Is all this publishing work to founder because the Sindice team is not big enough to cope, or no-one seems to be building the linkage systems, all because the data providers do not want to offer a simple search facility?

Best
Hugh

By the way, I am not suggesting that any identifiers such as GUIDs or PIDs should be read by humans - more the opposite. My agent should be able to find them easily and then ask me if that was what I meant, using words.

On 07/02/2009 13:39, "Yves Raimond" <yves.raimond@gmail.com> wrote:


I think this is a really dangerous idea. Most "web-scale" identifiers,
eg Musicbrainz GUIDs and BBC PIDs are not human readable (for a lot of
reasons, and mainly because human-readable identifiers are not unique
enough!!), but both provide really easy-to-use lookup service.
Such lookups, for other sites, can be provided by semantic web search
engines. It is exactly as in the document web: web identifiers are
mostly opaque, but search engines are here to provide the help needed.

So my proposal is: let's not confuse everything. Some people's job is
to make datasets available out there and as linked as possible to
others. Some other people make lookup services (eg Sindice), and I
think this separation of concerns works quite well.

Best,
y

Received on Saturday, 7 February 2009 14:32:27 UTC