Re: New LOD Cloud - Please send us links to missing data sources

On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 01:54 +0100, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
> Hi Andreaz :-)
> 
>         I don't see the difference between the LOD model and the data
>         (including
>         links) itself. At least to us at Zemanta it is immensely
>         helpful to have
>         a lot of those links done. It brings down the cost of doing
>         really
>         innovative stuff to us and I believe to many others too. 
>         
>         We don't dereference them in real-time, but ahead-of-time to
>         produce
>         specialized datasets, but I don't think that makes a
>         difference.
>         
> 
> to the risk of being pedantic..
> 
> Well the idea from the day 0 of the semantic web was that entity would
> be interlinked by the reuse of the same URI. "linking" or putting a
> "same as" is the same thing so nothing new.
> 
> the new part of LOD would be the publishing of a dataset as many
> individual RDF description corresponding to the resolution of each
> URI/URL. and that part is not being useful to you 

I wasn't here at its conception, so I can only talk about current
situation. Currently this is only a part of a bargain, but not the whole
thing. The other part is actually having some concrete set of federated
generally-interesting datasets that are interconnected instead of
abstract vision or one-off efforts.

So LOD is actually people working 'together' to get something practical
out of larger SW idea.

I also think that LOD has started to cause the Network effect. Every new
dataset makes others more usable.

>         > That the bubbles continue to grown is however a sociological
>         > interesting phenomen :-)
>         
>         
>         And a good sign that something has gone right :)
>         
> 
> Maybe :-) but people do things for many other reason that "they're
> right". An alternative explanation i like is
> http://inamidst.com/whits/2008/technobunkum 

I disagree LOD is this kind of a beast. Services like ours are proving
LOD is important for 'mainstream'. While it is a stretch to say our
service is (already) mainstream or that LOD is the main enabler, it is
definitely meant for mainstream and LOD plays a certain part in making
it achievable (cheaply enough).


>         I think LOD achievement is enormous and this is only the
>         start.
>         :)
> 
> Said picture might have helped to get a lot of  RDF data online. This
> is undoubtly a great achievement
> But sustenability and real growth comes only if we can prove real
> reasons for people to publish this data, and in this way. While we
> havent yet seen this, this doesnt mean that some application might not
> exist

we're on exactly the same page here! Sustainability and growth depend on
working incentives for publishers to publish the data. And there is just
one thing (commercial) publishers care about - direct and indirect
traffic. 

If a good incentive is getting more links from bloggers (which in turn
brings traffic and increases different rankings), there you have one in
Zemanta. Ok, actually it is only a potential, since we include datasets
on one-by-one basis. But when a company approaches us to incorporate
their links into our suggestion pool the first question we ask is: Do
you have proper connections into LOD? It makes everything so much
easier.

To date bloggers have created more than a million permanent hyperlinks
with Zemanta. For some links the ability to suggest them came from the
fact that the LOD data and links were available.

I am sure there must be some other LOD related services that in the 'end
consequence' bring traffic to the publishers. We are working on at least
another one - "Simple Semantic Tagging".

bye
andraz

> Giovanni
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
-- 
Andraz Tori, CTO
Zemanta Ltd, London, Ljubljana
www.zemanta.com
mail: andraz@zemanta.com
tel: +386 41 515 767
twitter: andraz, skype: minmax_test

Received on Monday, 2 March 2009 09:13:25 UTC