Cluster input on benefits of LD

Dear Ed, Emmanuelle, Ross,

On:

ACTION: Cluster owners to check the bullet-point list in http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/Draft_Benefits reflects their understanding and covers relevant points [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/minutes/2011/03/31-lld-minutes.html#action04]

The current benefits for our Alignment cluster read:

[
Linked data technologies provide tools to express, share and exploit semantic mapping or merging of concepts across value vocabularies, e.g., represented using SKOS, as well as elements (classes, properties) from metadata element sets, as defined in (RDFS/OWL) ontologies. On the other hand, the ease of publishing data without bothering about these semantic connections in the first place is raising problems: Proliferation of URIs and Managing Coreference has been identified as one of the main "semantic elephants" in the room [1]. The issue of establishing connection (especially, equivalence) between entities that are semantically comparable is common to all Linked Data applications. The current number of links is an order of magnitude below the number of entities published on the LOD cloud, and one only dataset (DBPedia) serves as semantic mapping hub for almost the entire LOD cloud.
]


This comes from our own cluster page, so we won't disagree with it :-). However, the second part does not really sound like benefits!
We had a quick discussion and came with the following:

[
LD technology does not provide itself with semantic connections between data from different information spaces. However it provides with an ideal framework for representing and sharing such connections, once established by human curators or automatic tools. Such connections help establishing links that are not only equivalency statements, but also allow for asserting richer semantic connections between entities. This can happen both at the level of the data organization (via metadata element sets) and at the level of the entities populating the data (e.g., intellectual or artistic works, agents, topics, geo-references). It helps re-using data coming from different environments and building applications over heterogeneous (semantic) environments. And in turns it gives a stronger motivation for the first crucial semantic alignment effort.
This is even more true that LD technology also brings the promise of making such alignment an easier task, by providing tools that can contribute to (semi-)automatic linking processes, and above all, making available huge bodies of reference data which can be used to enhance the connection process for new data.
]

Of course we're not saying that this should be fit as such in the section. But if you need a reference against which you could check your final benefit text, this seems more complete!

Cheers,

Marcia, Michael, Antoine

Received on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 20:35:01 UTC