Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

On 17 Jun 2011, at 17:36, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:

> Wave! I'm very much in the hacker community too. Get cool stuff done on hack days and so forth.
> 
> My current hack:
> screen scraping the glastonbury festival site to get their entire programme;
> http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/glastonbury/2011/
> 
> And then
> http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/glastonbury/2011/sparql
> 
> And then
> http://g2011.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Very nice UI and cool hack too. Showing and explaining how to quickly put together cool apps like this is one good meme that can catch on - and so become viral.

But the next thing to do is technical virality, where the software itself creates an incentive to link into the data web. For example by allowing people to comment on the page above (with experience of the band) after authenticating using WebID [1]. This gives people an incentive to have a webid, and so to have a foaf, and so to maintain data themselves (using a neat UI of course). As more of those people tie themselves in, there is more reason to build cool apps, which can become even cooler because they are then social without being centralised. 

In short we need to all work together in the semweb as a team, using the tools we have built to do that. It's really not difficult to do. :-)


[1] video http://bblfish.net/blog/2011/05/25/

> 
> 
> 
> Henry Story wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 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/
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248
> 
> You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Friday, 17 June 2011 15:52:21 UTC