Re: Linked Stuff [was Re: RDF's challenge]

On 6/11/13 1:59 PM, David Booth wrote:
> On 06/11/2013 12:18 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>> On 6/11/13 11:56 AM, David Booth wrote:
>>> On 06/11/2013 10:59 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>>>> [ . . . ]  many RDF advocates
>>>> want to conflate Linked Data and RDF. This is technically wrong, and
>>>> marketing wise -- an utter disaster.
>>>
>>> I have not heard RDF advocates conflating Linked Data and RDF, but
>>> maybe you talk to different RDF advocates than me.
>>>
>>> AFAICT, the vast majority of RDF advocates know that Linked Data is
>>> RDF in which URIs are deferenceable to more RDF, but RDF is not
>>> necessarily Linked Data, because RDF itself does not require URIs to
>>> be dereferenceable.
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> RDF isn't the defining characteristic when speaking about Linked Data
>> outside the RDF community.
>
> But RDF *is* one of Linked Data's defining characteristics, regardless 
> of whether people outside the RDF community understand that.  (And it 
> seems to me that if they don't understand that, then we should help 
> them to understand that, rather than perpetuating their 
> misunderstanding.)

Of course its one of the defining characteristics. My point is that it 
isn't the most important characteristic when speaking to folks outside 
the RDF community when the subject matter is Linked Data.

This is the crux of the matter re. our disagreement. I don't see a need 
to inject RDF into my conversations about Linked Data when my target 
audience isn't interested in RDF or overtly suffers from R-D-F reflux.

>
>> It is much more palatable outside of the RDF
>> community to loosely couple Linked Data (the concept) and RDF (a
>> framework) which enables the construction of powerful Linked Data that's
>> endowed with *explicit* human and machine-comprehensible entity
>> relationships semantics.
>
> We could define a new concept that decouples RDF from Linked Data.

We don't need to define a new concept. A concept exists, and it is 
loosely coupled with RDF.

Linked Data (the concept) existed before RDF. Even in TimBL's mind it 
clearly existed before RDF [1].

The original design of the Web includes a variety of relations, the most 
important one being the "describes" relation. All of the relations were 
denoted using links which became URI (a powerful abstraction mechanism 
for a variety of data related endeavors).

-10000 for your "Linked Stuff" . Sorry!

Links:

1. http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/w3c/Image1.gif 
-- that's a Linked Data way before any notion of R-D-F.

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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