Re: Making human-friendly linked data pages more human-friendly (was: dbpedia not very visible, nor fun)

Matthias,

On 15 Sep 2009, at 14:30, Matthias Samwald wrote:
> Richard wrote:
>> First, there are some datasets that combine linked data output with  
>> a traditional website, e.g., by embedding some RDFa markup. Of  
>> course,  in that case, all the rules of good web design and  
>> information  presentation still apply, and the site has to first  
>> and foremost  fulfill the visitor's information needs in order to  
>> be successful.  That's self-evident and not what we are talking  
>> about here.
>
> Indeed. But a typical web page is full of hyperlinks to external  
> sites. In the case of pages based on RDFa, this will often mean  
> linking to external linked data resources. Many normal web pages,  
> such as blogs, contain several links to wikipedia.org. Many linked  
> data resources contain links to dbpedia.org. RDFa uses the <a> HTML  
> element to represent object properties, and I think there will be an  
> increasing desire to create links to, say, DBpedia that are both  
> useful for the human reader of the RDFa page, as well as for RDF- 
> aware software. It would be very nice to just say
>
> "... blahblah <a href="http://dbpedia.org/page/Primary_motor_cortex"  
> rel="sioc:topic">Primary motor cortex</a> blahblah ..."
>
> instead of both linking to Wikipedia for the human plus an added  
> hidden link to DBpedia for the machine, like this:
>
> " ... blahblah <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_motor_cortex 
> ">Primary motor cortex</a><a href="http://dbpedia.org/page/Primary_motor_cortex 
> " rel="sioc:topic"></a> blahblah ..."

Aside: Here's a less ugly version, @resource overrides @href if both  
are present:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_motor_cortex" resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Primary_motor_cortex 
" rel="sioc:topic">Primary motor cortex</a>

> I think that with the increasing popularity of RDFa, linked data  
> resources that have a good looking HTML representation will become  
> more popular for re-use in RDF statements than those that do not  
> have good looking HTML representations. In other words, the RDFa  
> pages will gradually change the ecosystem for linked data resources,  
> also impacting the resource providers that do not primarily intend  
> to have their pages found via Google and Yahoo.
>
> Hence, the fact that
>> the "audience" for the human-readable versions of the  RDF data is  
>> *not* a visitor that came to the site while googling for  some bit  
>> of information. It's more likely to be a data analyst, mashup   
>> developer, or integration engineer.
>
> might become less and less true.

These are good points, and I don't really disagree with any of them,  
except perhaps in that I think that at the moment, data quality, a  
sensible URI scheme, wide coverage, perception of stability, and  
proper marketing are more likely to determine the success of a dataset  
in attracting links. It is true that at some point in the future, we  
will take it for granted that any serious dataset has all those  
attributes, and then the quality of the visual representation would  
perhaps close or break the deal.

Best,
Richard


>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Matthias Samwald
>
> DERI Galway, Ireland
> http://deri.ie/
>
> Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research, Austria
> http://kli.ac.at/
>

Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 14:26:22 UTC