Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

On 17 Jun 2011, at 14:51, adasal wrote:

> Don't expect any support from that quarter. (Well apart from a few unhelpful scraps.)
> 
> The question is how can the SemWeb academic community address these issues?

There is the hacker community too, btw. The academic community is looking to be way ahead of the curve, and loves dealing with problems that are difficult to solve. The hacker communuity may be more interested in building things that work and are immediately useful - there is just no other way to grow the community of knowledgeable users.

So I think it is the developer hacker community that one has to look at. And that means looking at the problem space and working out what solutions are viral - so that every hacker will want to participate - and also which can be implemented easily with current available tools by the largest community of developers.

So for this you don't want to rely on the "big" players. They can't help that much, because they will tend to build things that work best for them: are centralised and don't work that well in a distributed space.

You need something where each user benefits when every other user joins. And in my view that is the social web. The web started in exactly the same way: a few people built web pages that linked together. Each person that did found it valuable to convince others to join too. With structured linked data one can do the same thing, if one makes the data potent: ie it has to have an effect on people: by joining a group you get access to a party, a community of users, a discussion forum.

In that space we have foaf you may say. But nobody really bothered making it potent. For example the viral part is missing: we only just wrote up a paper on how to make friending easy (viral) http://bblfish.net/tmp/2011/05/09/

So what the linked data community needs is really to go back to basics and build really useful applications of linked data, where you get more and more people to join in by showing immediate benefits. 

Henry


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/