Re: studies about LD visibility

Hi Jun,


2009/1/27 Jun Zhao <jun.zhao@zoo.ox.ac.uk>
>
>>
>>  Our projects have been supporting the needs from users who have little or
>> no techy background. They quite buy the idea of Semantic Web, for making it
>> easier to mash up datasets, technically speaking. However, we are still
>> looking for compelling cases to show that there are things that cannot be
>> done without LD. And I would really want to know what the LD community feels
>> about how far the LD technology is reaching outside the SW community.
>
>

Things that cannot be done without LD:

I don't think there is technically anything that explicitly cannot be done
without Linking Open Data.

However, there are some things that could be done much more flexibly, in
more scalable ways.

Without LOD model, you would usually be depending on developers to hard code
links between data into multiple applications. You would also need DB access
to many different applications. Users would be far more limited in ways that
they can combine and explore data. LOD is going to be closest we can come to
letting non-programmers/regular software users be able to ask questions of
multipe data sets in very flexible ways. It can scale up to many data
sets/sources, many ways to view queries, even many ways to turn around and
shre the output of those queries with others.

>From a developer point of view, making it easy to incorporate LOD into
existing applications is vital.

I can imagine, for instance, people working in the site that I am developing
at http://localfoodsystems.org, having access to data sets from multiple
sources, with an interface that allows them to combine datasources, and
query them very easily, to get info on soil conditions, markets, pests,
drought report data, etc etc.

Or if many people wanted to contribute to local food systems knowledge bases
from multiple sources, they could have RDF or RDFa data coming from their
various sites.

One of the things that I am interested in, is thinking about how to lower
the barrier of entry for LOD, by making it easier for more people to be able
to output data in standard ways.


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Sam Rose
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