A practical way forward for Linked Data

On 19/06/2013 15:19, Dominic Oldman wrote:
> When Hugh talks about sharing a particular view I also think about the 
> need to share particular objectives, and a particular vision, and 
> match this with a practical way forward. When Hugh talks about 
> widening of issues I think about how we are ever going to produce 
> practical applications based on linked data principles, that operate 
> over many different and varied datasets, and which are trusted and 
> robust. It might be worth moving the conversation to think about 
> practical use cases and reaching conclusions about what it would 
> actually take to produce the solutions that are desperately needed, 
> not to satisfy the people on this list (who all share an interest in 
> making this work), but all the people who deserve to receive the 
> benefits that linked data groups constantly promise but haven't yet 
> delivered  - but which are achievable.
>
> How does my sector create useful applications that operate across the 
> extremely diverse and varied datasets that highly individual cultural 
> heritage organisations produce but which together form a body of work 
> that could revolutionise the way that we work, discover, collaborate 
> and disseminate important information about our world and culture? 
> Simply publishing 'linked data' in an random and uncoordinated way is 
> not enough. Many (including subscribers to this list) are attempting 
> to find a practical route forward and are working hard to create and 
> demonstrate practical solutions (through practical end user 
> applications using RDF and robust contextual standards) and, if 
> necessary, will focus on better practical solutions - but based on 
> firm and solid (theoretical integrity is important and the views of 
> people on this list and others are therefore also very important) 
> foundations. We do this also thinking hard about the type of 
> infrastructure and support that we would also need to establish.
Dominic,

I think that your work at ResearchSpace [1] offers some important 
pointers as regards the direction of travel.  Here we have a shared 
space into which cultural heritage resources can be loaded, with a 
strong suggestion that they should be structured according to the CIDOC 
CRM to allow cross-resource searching to deliver meaningful results.  
However, if we can agree on, and deploy, consistent "design patterns" 
for the use of frameworks such as the CRM for cultural heritage content, 
then it matters less whether everything is in one place.  Any resources 
that are on the web can be spidered and indexed, especially if they 
publish a helpful ToC (e.g. VoID).

I think two big challenges will be to get our stringy data converted to 
URLs, and for those URLs to be ones which are shared across the domain.  
Of these, the second challenge is probably the harder, since (as you 
have found at the BM) it is relatively straightforward to mint URLs 
in-house to represent a well-structured set of linked database keys.  
However, that just creates a self-referencing silo. Referencing an 
external resource involves a "letting go", which might be at least as 
hard psychologically as the technical challenge.  Also, we lack many of 
the resources we could and should share.  Geography has been done (e.g. 
Geonames), but would benefit from an historical dimension.  There is 
nothing for events. The (historical) human race is also pretty badly 
served, taken as a whole (unless you happen to be an artist, author or 
"notable person").  How do we conjure these shared resources into existence?

Richard

[1] http://www.researchspace.org/
-- 
*Richard Light*