Re: Improving Organization of Govt. based Linked Data Projects

On 21/03/2010 13:00, "Dan Brickley" <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

> On 21 Mar 2010, at 12:47, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Kingsley, I am right with you - finding stuff is hard.
>> But I do think we could make it easier for all of us.
>> Just the esw wiki alone requires me to put every set I create into a
>> bunch of places
> 
> 10 years ago, looking for RDF on the public Web was like looking for a
> needle in a haystack. There wasnt much out there and it was poorly
> linked. So a big part of the thinking that led to the foaf/rdfweb
> design was to make discovery easier: if you find one rdf doc, you
> should be able to find most of the rest by following seeAlso and other
> kinds of links.
> 
> Why isn't this enough? Perhaps because many of the datasets are huge
> db exports, crawlers are often overwhelmed and dissapear into depth-
> first holes? Or because we don't publish triples about doc- and
> dataset-types in a crawler-discoverable way?
Yes, sort of.
I think the problem is now with metadata for the datasets, which is great.
Actually if everyone published semantic sitemaps and voiD descriptions etc.,
and we had the tools to re-present the data, we would be well along the
road.
At worst, I might register my site somewhere (as I do with Sindice), say "go
figure". Pages such as the esw ones should then appear magically.
> 
> A wiki page is ok for initial bootstrap but we ought to outgrow that
> soon...
But I think we may be pleased to say that "soon" has arrived?
And perhaps if it was easier we would discover that there is so much more
out there that the wiki page hasn't actually been enough for a while. I can
think of 10 interesting datasets that aren't there (that aren't mine).

I am tempted to say that we spend all our time persuading others to take
things like those tables and republish as RDF, but... :-)

And yes, I know this has been a topic before, but we really should be
feeling increasingly embarrassed by this.

Best
Hugh 
> 
> Dan

Received on Sunday, 21 March 2010 13:13:58 UTC