- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>
- Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 14:42:04 +0000
- To: Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>
- Cc: RDFa WG <public-rdfa-wg@w3.org>
Hi Shane, > I read this. I will read it again. But when we are talking about > subsetting RDFa and the problems it could cause... we should remember this > article. http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/11/semantic-web-linked-data.html Mmm...I'm not so sure it's that useful. It follows the usual format of these kinds of articles: 'everything before was really complicated and now the semantic web will become a reality because the pragmatists have taken over'. (Pragmatists being those people who don't have an "abstract desire to structure the unstructured", which I guess they do in between arranging their CD collections in alphabetical order...those who still have CDs, that is.) So far so what...except Tyler then goes on to suggest that linked data is the poster-child for this 'new' semantic web, and that it can be achieved using existing APIs. This is odd because linked data is something that is actually quite precise: it involves the publication of RDF, about giving everything a URI, and so on. Obviously there are lots of APIs out there that return data, but they don't address the really hard issues such as provenance or working out when two entities are the same. All of which makes this comment particularly ironic: However, I may be alone in believing that we need to nail the problem of multiple instances of the same entity, via concordance and crosswalking, before we can tap properly into the rich vein that entity relationships offer. Yeh...Tyler's 'alone' with only the people who have written papers, presented at conferences and spent years working on PhDs aimed at solving this problem for company. No doubt I sound very grumpy about this and normally I would just ignore these kinds of articles, but I'm responding here because you raised it. By the way, I think the easiest way to look at OGP is as a microformat. 'RDFa and Microformats Are Not As Far Apart As People Think' looks at some of these issues: <http://bit.ly/aSMad2> All the best, Mark
Received on Tuesday, 16 November 2010 14:43:22 UTC