Re: centralized vs decentralized extensibility

On 7 June 2016 at 17:03, Kevin Marks <kevinmarks@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you are pointing to centralised proprietary silos such as
> schema.org and facebook OGP as examples of decentralisation I really
> don't understand what you mean by the term.
>
> Just because they are using markup that if you don't look too closely
> you can claim as RDF does not make them decentralised. This is
> duckspeak.
>

So it's been a while since I looked at OGP itself but I seem to recall
linked data being used.  The point I am trying to make is that facebook
return RDF / Linked data in their profiles and a ton of other data.

What I have looked at lately is the Facebook graph API.

http://semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj282_0.pdf

Schema.org plays nicely with other vocabs, just in the same way that AS2
does, or am I missing something?

What I am trying to get across is that bottom up design scales to the whole
social web even if you have a few centralized curators.  Can anyone make a
serious argument against this, either theoretical or practical?


>
> On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 3:06 AM, Melvin Carvalho
> <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Sandro recently made a point in favor of centralized extensibility.
> >
> > I would like to argue that this kind of centralization does not scale on
> the
> > social web.
> >
> >> Personally, I feel like decentralized extensibility is a moral and
> >> psychological issue, but I'm well aware that the case for decentralized
> >> extensibility is weak.
> >
> > I strongly disagree that the case for decentralized extensibility is
> weak.
> >
> > Centralized standards have been tried a number or times on the social web
> > and they have almost all failed.  My reasoning is that the whole social
> web
> > is too vast for some central authority to please everyone.  You can only
> > please a small group, and that leads to balkanization, which is what we
> see
> > today.
> >
> > I do agree it is moral and psychological because it is top down decision
> > making vs bottom up grass roots self organization.
> >
> >
> >> The vision is of a wonderfully free and open yet interoperable
> ecosystem,
> >> but in practice that doesn't seem to happen.
> >
> > Why do you think this?  The facebook open graph has proliferated.
> > Schema.org has proliferated.  JSON LD has proliferated.  These are all
> > largely interoperable standards all along the same lines.
> >
> >> By far the greatest adoption of RDF happened when it was coupled with
> >> schema.org, with only centralized extensibility.
> >
> > I think it's worth pointing out that facebook open graph is a significant
> > adopter of linked data / RDF.  Indeed last time I checked all of their
> user
> > profiles and graph are available as RDF.  There have also been other
> > adopters of RDF orders of magnitude bigger than the usage I see of
> > webmention.  I'd welcome numbers, but from what I can tell webmention
> > adoption numbers are statistically insignificant when compared with even
> > minor RDF deployments
> >
> > I think the arguments that are being made for centralization are just not
> > accurate.  We've been down this path before in the social web.  Hint: it
> > doesnt work.
>