Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

Hi Henry,
Hope you are good.

Yes there is the hacker community and that is the twist in the tail of the
story of the internet.
It may well be that certain projects will gather sufficient momentum to
address the balance (that I explain I see needs addressing, akin to pirate
radio + commercial broadcasting viz public broadcasting, if you like).
That said the hacker is a various beast, and I wonder if this sort of thing
can really be addressed without overarching political/ethical/idealogical
concerns. It's tough. Thinking about the BBC, they do have a charter and
that charter is framed with those considerations. I do not think that, and I
would expect others to argue about whether, the BBC is the absolute acme of
probity. But I think it a good starting point example.
It is also impossible to know what might catch on, certainly the domain of
the (open) knowledge web is broader than the social web. It leads on up to
machine machine interaction.
Oddly, though, while I can follow the example I gave of a use case for
semantic technologies that intersect with government, business and the
public I am stumped coming up with much in the social sphere. There must be
other ways of slicing and dicing that domain apart from facebook?

Adam

On 17 June 2011 16:30, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> 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/
>
>