- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 20:04:08 -0400
- To: Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- cc: Sherman Monroe <sdmonroe@gmail.com>, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, "semantic-web@w3.org" <semantic-web@w3.org>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, David Huynh <dfhuynh@alum.mit.edu>
> Sure; I just disagree that a browser that essentially gives a view of
> one linked data portal should be promoted as a "linked data browser".
> By that definition something like http://revyu.com/ is a linked data
> browser.
>
> Long ago in what used to be called the Semantic Web world, it was
> thought that collecting rdf from out there and loading it into a
> single store and then writing applications over it (such as CS
> AKTiveSpace) constituted a Semantic Web application.
>
> But then some time later, but also long ago, we realised that it was
> only an application using semantic web technologies, as there was no
> web involved. I think we are in danger of repeating this
> misconception and distraction again in the Linked Data world.
>
> Fundamentally the data that your browser works over is a single Linked
> Data site. This site may have data that has been gathered from lots of
> places, and URIs that reflect those places somehow in the text, but in
> the end it is a single site.
>
> I don't think I can give your browser any URI I choose that resolves
> using http to a typical LD document? If not, it is not a linked data
> browser.
>
> I used to have a mantra: "Putting the Web into Semantic Web". It now
> seems I need to say "Putting the Web back into Linked Data", or even
> "Putting the Web into the Web of Data".
>
> It may be we will just have to differ on this; however I would be really
> interested to know if I am alone in my view -- any comments from others?
I'm with you 100% here.
Tabulator is an example of a "real" client-side semantic web browser.
At one point I had working server-side code that was similar; like
Kingsley's machine, it had a large database of site's data it had been
loaded with, BUT if you ever used a URI it hadn't already tried, it put
that URI on the high-priority harvesting queue, and (when things worked
well) had slurped in the data before you got your response -- so it
appeared to have all the LOD data in it. SPARQL servers can do that
too, and I imagine some do.
The interesting questions is can we have stateless SPARQL servers that
distribute the query to other SPARQL servers, and what metadata do they
need to do that well? I guess voiD is supposed to address that; I don't
know how well it does it, etc. (I haven't had a chance to follow this
work much recently.)
-- Sandro
Received on Saturday, 16 May 2009 00:04:26 UTC