Re: How to use LOD for practical purposes?

Hello Laura,

Good question. I am also curious to read the answers. I suppose that
it is in the biomedical field that we should find the most practical uses
of a decentralized LOD cloud. But this recent position paper
<https://openreview.net/pdf?id=H1lS_g81gX> by Axel Polleres and al.
suggests that even in those fields it is a kind of jungle.

Best,

Ettore Rizza


Le lun. 19 nov. 2018 à 12:47, Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@atomgraph.com>
a écrit :

> Christopher,
>
> I agree that so far there has been no Linked Data API "contract". But
> it does not mean one is not possible. We have in fact developed a
> specification for that purpose called Linked Data Templates:
> https://atomgraph.github.io/Linked-Data-Templates/
>
> Martynas
> atomgraph.com
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 12:08 PM Christopher Gutteridge
> <totl@soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > I find RDF a reasonably useful tool in my toolbox, like JSON, XML etc.
> >
> > I like the idea to reuse URIs so that two RDF datasets can be "mashed
> > up" with no (well, less) effort.
> >
> > I find the idea of a document retrieved by a URI being identified by
> > that URI as a problem, for several reasons, and would prefer that the
> > URI for a document returned on the web was in the HTTP response header,
> > or in the document itself.
> >
> > I find the idea of resolving a URI to get more information about it has
> > largely failed. There's no "contract" about what is to be returned, so
> > you have to make the request to see what you get. This is not a good API
> > for automated systems. You might get something useful. You might get
> > 100Mb of crud. It's handy for humans who can copy with whatever they
> > get. I've tried to address this in our OPD system by saying that the
> > document that describes an organisation's profile may contain anything,
> > but certain things should be described in a specific way. I think that's
> > a form of "application profile" which states a restricted way to use a
> > vocabulary to make it possible to generate, validate and consume by
> > automated systems. <http://opd.data.ac.uk/>
> >
> > Finally mashing up datasets from different sources will encounter many
> > issues around assumptions. Statements can be contradictory, but still
> > true, because their contexts differ. What matters to one dataset doesn't
> > matter to another. eg. the location of my University can be shown as a
> > single lat/long of our main postal & admin hub, but it's not the *whole*
> > truth and if you wanted to find all university owned property in the UK
> > then that's useless and misleading. Also, did you mean "owned" or
> > "occupied" because we rent some buildings... but call them "our"
> > buildings. etc. People also conflate meanings. The university Library
> > is: A building, an organisation, a point-of-service and a collection of
> > media. All these are true but these are disjoint things an organisation
> > is not a collection of media!  I feel that the Marvel movies are a good
> > example of what happens when you try to make too many logically
> > inconsistent things exist in one place (I don't like comic book
> > crossovers!). See also a blog post I wrote on this issue
> > <https://blog.soton.ac.uk/webteam/2010/09/02/the-modeler/>
> >
> >
> > On 19/11/2018 10:28, Laura Morales wrote:
> > > As a newcomer to LOD, I find using LOD very very very confusing and
> impractical. To be clear, I think that by now I understand the model pretty
> well; the theory behind it. My problem is that most *practical* uses of LOD
> have been a really bad experience, in particular when linking different
> data sources coming from different places. It's pretty easy to reason about
> a single graph, that is a consistent graph that was built in one piece,
> since everywhere around the graph the structure is usually fairly constant
> and predictable. But when I want to get information from two or more linked
> graphs... oh boy... they can be using different types, different ontologies
> for the same thing (or even custom ones!), different ways of linking,
> different conventions, ... As a human, I can more or less navigate through
> the graphs: I start somewhere and I follow the links, and I find something
> that makes sense to me. But I can't see a computer doing this kind of work;
> it's a hard problem that has got to require some kind of intelligence.
> > > So my question really is: what am I, the user, supposed to do to get
> information out of linked graphs? I download 2, 3, o 4 graphs from various
> sources, then what? Am I supposed to make my own graph by
> inferring/reasoning/extracting data from those sources in order to make
> them more reasonable? In a perfect world all those graphs would be all
> perfectly linked and plug-and-play but this clearly is not how people
> publish their data. Or is there a magical way to make all this information
> *practical* to use, something that a computer can use without requiring an
> ultimate AI?
> > >
> >
> > --
> > Christopher Gutteridge <totl@soton.ac.uk>
> > You should read our team blog at http://blog.soton.ac.uk/webteam/
> >
> >
>
>