Backlinks

Hi

I'm wondering about the value of backlinks in the LOD space. Basically
if we have a foaf:Person at http://example.org/pete with a foaf:knows
relation to http://example.net/mary , is it useful/necessary to also
have the corresponding inverse link (also foaf:knows in this case)
pointing in the other direction?

Presumably, in a LOD context this would ease decentralized discovery of
data, but the other approach is of course to query Sindice or any other
(hypothetical?) central indexing node. So my question is: what are the
relative merits of these two approaches in the eyes of the community?

I'm also interested if there are existing implementations of the
backlink approach, something in the vein of the "trackback" and
"pingback" protocols that serve this purpose in the non-semantic Web
today.
-- 
Vasiliy Faronov

Received on Wednesday, 21 October 2009 14:04:39 UTC