Re: Socialnetworks of a person or organization

On 11 April 2014 08:10, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
<martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

An aside re

> I am planning to flatten the implementation in www.productontology.org so that there will be just one URI for the page and the type entity, essentially removing all linked data stuff in the near future.

<personal-soapbox>

It is a mistake to conflate "Linked Data" with this super-fragile
deployment style.

The original Linked Data note
(http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html) was essentially a
response to the RDFWeb FOAF work at the time, and just said "let's try
to label lots of these blank nodes with URIs that connect us to more
RDF, instead of using rdfs:seeAlso". It is a pity if this insight has
become enshrined in a mountain of complex, expensive and discouraging
implementation detail, or a religious obsession with tieing every
single node in every single RDF graph to an URL that publishes RDF.

>From Tim's original note:

"""<#i> foaf:knows [
       foaf:mbox_sha1sum "2738167846123764823647";  # @@ dummy
  rdfs:seeAslo <http://example.com/foaf/joe> ].

This linking system was very successful, forming a  growing social
network, and dominating, in 2006, the linked data available on the
web.

However, the system has the snag that it does not give URIs to people,
and so basic links to them cannot be made.

I  recommend (e.g in weblogs on Links on the Semantic Web , Give
yourself a URI, and and Backward and Forward links in RDF just as
important) that those making a FOAF file give themselves a URI as well
as using the FOAF convention.     Similarly, when you refer to a FOAF
file which gives  a URI to a person, use it in your reference to that
person, so that clients which just use URIs and don't know about the
FOAF convention can follow the link."""

I consider schema.org (yes, even in Microdata) to be quite reasonable
Linked Data in this tradition. It is absolutely useful to have as many
identifiers as possible, but we shouldn't allow it to become an
obsession that overrides all other concerns e.g. webmaster usability.
Linked Data as a slogan took off in large part because of frustration
that "Semantic Web" had been taken over as slogan by people who cared
more for scholarly research than for the Web. It is a great pity if
the phrase "Linked Data" gets wasted in a similar fashion. IMHO
Schema.org (and FOAF) are perfectly fine applications of the Linked
Data idea. Nowhere in the sacred texts ("Use URIs as names for
things", "Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.", ...)
does it say "In every document, for every entity.", nor "publish every
relationship"; sometimes less is more. People worry too much. What
we're creating here are languages that allow everyone on the Web to
describe stuff in various levels of detail; we should let go of the
urge to be so proscriptive about what exactly they publish (uris,
string, blank nodes, etc.).

</personal-soapbox>

Dan

Received on Friday, 11 April 2014 07:47:15 UTC