Re: Where are the Linked Data Driven Smart Agents (Bots) ?

On 7 July 2016 at 20:49, Juan Sequeda <juanfederico@gmail.com> wrote:

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> On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Ruben Verborgh <ruben.verborgh@ugent.be>
> wrote:
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>> Hi Juan,
>>
>> Seems like we mostly agree—short remarks below.
>>
>> > One thing is science. Another is engineering.
>>
>> Perhaps we need Semantic Web Engineering conferences then as well!
>>
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> That's why you have developer conferences, etc. ISWC this year had a
> Applications track. And it doesn't have to be semantic web specific.
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>>
>> > If we don't know the right evaluation metrics (I agree with you that we
>> don't), then that is the current challenge we, as a semantic web scientific
>> community, have to tackle.
>>
>> Indeed, but I've found the scientific community to be not so open to new
>> evaluation metrics either. There is insufficient agreement on (and too
>> limited knowledge of) the right scientific methodology to tackle such novel
>> problems.
>>
>
> Well, I don't know what you have proposed. But it seems that you haven't
> made a convincing argument :P (if you want to discuss offline what you are
> doing, send me an email)
>
>
>>
>> > It shouldn't discourage you... on the contrary, it should encourage you
>> to identify novel ways to evaluate what you are doing and convince the
>> community why it is important.
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>> The trouble is you don't have to convince the entire community (with whom
>> you can have an open dialog), but a tiny set of anonymous reviewers (for
>> whom the known paths are often easier to judge).
>>
>
> Paper reviewing... that is different topic I don't want to get into here.
>
>
>> My remark was precisely that convincing is hard once you move away from
>> the known paths.
>>
>> So the scientific community, which is a large part of the total Semantic
>> Web community, might in that sense be hampering real novelty—from science
>> and engineering alike, whichever might be the difference.
>>
>
> There is a clear difference between Science and Engineering. That is my
> point.  Science is about understanding what is unknown. In this case, it is
> not well known how to evaluate new types of systems. That is what needs to
> be studied. We need to figure out how to evaluate and evaluation. It is a
> bit meta. Jim Hendler stated this 7 years ago and to the best of my
> knowledge, this is an area that hasn't been tackled (PhD thesis anybody?)
>
> If your goal is to get something out there and for it to be used, then why
> do you bother spending time publishing papers. Look at all the open source
> projects changing the world, with very little to no scientific
> publications.
>
> Just do what makes you happy and be the best at it. Strive for excellence!
> I know you are :)
>

I think it would be nice to have a common ground across the field.  e.g.

- Everyone has a profile page that is machine readable (so many people
still dont!)

- Beginning with that profile page, cross origin links are made, to create
new  connections, with friends, colleagues, people, places, things.

- The social graph is both browsable and writable to, so that changes can
be made, propagated and viewed by others.

- Each individual research project, feeds into this graph, augments it,
improves it, creates new possibilities.

In short, why not spend 20+% of our time using the semantic web in
collaboration with others to make it come alive?


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>> Best,
>>
>> Ruben
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