Re: Thought: 207 Description Follows

On 28/03/12 14:50, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> On Wednesday 28. March 2012 14.37.42 Jeni Tennison wrote:
>> I don't think it's web hosters who would find it hard to deploy, rather that
>> people who just want to publish some data on some tiny patch of web space
>> that they "own", often actually run by outsourced IT departments, do not
>> typically have access to either the software running on the servers (to
>> upgrade it) or to the configuration files that would enable them to change
>> status codes (or add headers for that matter).
>
> Oh, we're talking about the same people! Web hosters, may be companies that
> offer web hosting, typically on rather constrained environments, or IT
> departments, again with the type of constraints you mention. This software
> isn't static, it is usually upgraded in a cycle of 3-4 years, so in those
> years, we can get our code in there.

I, at least, am not talking about web hosters even in those indirect guises.

The people who are (in my experience) putting time, effort and money 
into getting linked data published are generally in the "line of 
business" and may have little or no direct influence over the web hosters.

For example, in UK local government then even getting a static file 
published on a web site is very tricky if the file type isn't on the 
list of acceptable file types for that organization.

Another example, as Michael said (talking about a slightly different 
group of people) some publishers are not allowed to touch anything in 
the head section of their HTML.

This particular piece of the puzzle is not a technology or tools issue. 
The web hosting in those cases is perfectly capable of publishing static 
files or allowing content in the head of an html document. It is an 
organizational and social issue.

Dave

> So, the key here is to understand how our software gets into those servers, so
> it is there to begin with. So that there is no strange tweaking of config files,
> no user-supplied packages. How can we make thousands of such companies
> advertise that they host linked data, like they advertise that you can use
> MySQL, memcached, or nginx. *That's* what we have to do.
>
> Kjetil
>

Received on Wednesday, 28 March 2012 14:36:31 UTC