- From: oldskeptic via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2022 16:00:53 +0000
- To: public-sdwig@w3.org
TL;DR - If the institution can't follow through on the best practice, let's remove it. I'm getting on my soap-box this morning. The semantic web, in its many incarnations, is a hard sell because it deals with _what-it-is_ instead of _what-does-it-looks-like_. I'm aggressively paraphrasing comments by @philarcher at [ldg14](https://www.w3.org/2014/03/lgd/report) from memory, but there has been a large influx of web programmers in the past decade. Their frame of reference is what is on the screen with a focus on the immediate problem. Interoperability isn't their concern, you just fix that by buying a service API somewhere. This shouldn't be a problem, but our IT organizations are focused on desktop support and have lost their systems-oriented[?] staff which makes it hard for a champion to push systemic changes. It also results in bizarre conversations where public query[discovery] mechanisms like SPARQL/GraphQL will be installed "over my dead body" because of security concerns while we push EDI transactions over plaintext FTP because "it's always been that way". The product manager quoted by @PeterParslow is entirely right: when ESRI/QGIS/Spreadsheets are the only tools available, you are going to download the whole thing just to find what you are looking for. I have also been told by one national library representative that if I expect to use their data, I need to download their entire 2TB catalog (since it isn't that big?!). There is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem here. I've built and sold a few services using SemWeb geosparql technologies. From personal experience, the customers care about the product, not that it uses linked open data. The truth is that most of the work here appears as hair-splitting to non-specialists, including web programmers, however it is important and needed: * A recent agricultural project I'm aware of focused on 'fixing farm data exchange with new standards like GeoJson and not old crap'. Agricultural fields are features with (for entirely justifiable reasons) about a half-dozen geometries not all of whom are WGS84. It came as a hard shock when none of the derived metrics for crop insurance, bushel predictions and accreditation reporting made any sense. The project was replaced by string-only forms with push pins on Google Maps and declared a success. * **What you see isn't what you get.** Looking at the representation of Newfoundland and Labrador in @prushforth's [app](https://maps4html.org/experiments/linking/features/), it is one of many interpretations of the inter-provincial boundaries in a dispute that dates back to before the [BNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_and_Labrador%E2%80%93Quebec_border) act. Costly business and policy decisions have already been made based on different maps of the boundaries. What happens when a geocoder determines sales tax or residency using this geometry? The app shows a large chunk of the capital city, St. John's, to be outside the province. Is this data precision or a political reality? Consider instead [this historical example about N&L's boundaries using GeoSparql](https://blog.muninn-project.org/node/75). It allows you to commit to logical statements with incomplete geometries. This type of problem is common with more than one case about [homeowners getting two tax bills from two different towns](https://www.thesunchronicle.com/news/a-house-two-towns-and-the-tax-bill/article_fe583b13-5cf0-5a30-a9b6-79980e377ef1.html). A limited analogy is email. Every institution used to have a sendmail guru. Now we've outsourced that to a limited number of providers that deal with a twine-ball of standards that are madness to normal people. Yet, most of the time, mail just works. End consumers may want geoJSON and spreadsheets but we need complex semantic web specs to keep the lights on and serve them the data. The URI endpoints make sense as identifiers and as a way to synchronize specific resources you care about. It also allows me to reference you directly, agree and disagree with you. "Traversing the links" is really short hand for "I'm browsing wikipedia" which was a great demo at the time but doesn't work for search or at scale. A lot of places still run with a few ESRI licenses saving to a shared drive, but I don't see this as a sustainable solutions. -- GitHub Notification of comment by oldskeptic Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/sdw/issues/1328#issuecomment-1021340433 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Tuesday, 25 January 2022 16:00:55 UTC