Re: Business Models, Profitability, and Linked Data

Sure thing Kingsley.
As you say, there are things that are now possible that weren't.
But it doesn't mean they have to be done.
I'm just being a bit sceptical.
Forensics: I meant that when something goes wrong in the food chain, it is often things like DNA that have been used, and people jump straight back searching for where the problem might have originated.
Think of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak.
More like data mining than provenance tracking.
Similarly, if I see some data (a sentence in an academic paper?) and want to try to find out where it originated, I stuff something into a search engine, rather than follow references.
Will that change so much with better provenance tracking and tools to do it?
I'm not sure.
Yes, the food analogy has limits, but I quite like it for this one.

Best
Hugh

On 11 Jun 2013, at 13:15, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
 wrote:

> On 6/11/13 7:59 AM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
>> On 10 Jun 2013, at 15:07, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
>>  wrote:
>> 
>>> On 6/10/13 9:06 AM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>> <snip snip snip />
>>>> Sometimes its important to know how the sausage is made, sometimes its not.
>>> You always need to know who made the sausage :-)
>>> 
>>> Kingsley
>> I know this is sort of a throw-away remark, but actually, that isn't true, and applies to data as well.
>> (And in the UK, it is an interesting question, given that there has recently been a lot of stuff about horse in processed foods.)
>> When most people buy sausages they have no idea who made them, and are perfectly happy to buy them.
> 
> There is value in being able to triangulate back to who made the sausage. Remember, this is about business models which boil down to orchestrating value creation, distribution, and consumption.
>> The trust comes from the direct supplier in the supply chain.
> 
> Yes, because the actual producer of the sausage is dislocated from said chain. Today, the Web enables us address the aforementioned dislocation. That's my fundamental point re. power of HTTP URIs and Linked Data.
> 
>> And even when something goes wrong, it is not detected and tracked by provenance of the supply chain, but by forensics.
> 
> Forensics and Data differ how? I know of no such thing as forensics that isn't basically piecing bits of data together en route to insights.
>> 
>> Consumers of data at the most similarly only want to know that the immediate supplier warrants (or whatever) the data.
> 
> I am talking about what's possible with Linked Data in relation to business model, today. Not about what was difficult to attain in a world where what we have now didn't exist :-)
> 
> 
>> 
>> Best
>> Hugh
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kingsley Idehen	
> Founder & CEO
> OpenLink Software
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Received on Tuesday, 11 June 2013 12:41:01 UTC