Re: Re: Is there real world RDF-S/OWL instance data?

Hi Bob,

On 8/3/06, Bob DuCharme <bob@snee.com> wrote:
> I find it perfectly plausible that there is more RDF behind firewalls than
> publicly available (although of course we can't be sure), but I was
> curious: do you have any ideas about why this is so? Could it be because a
> system limited to use within one enterprise makes it easier to impose more
> top-down control over the use of a particular ontology, and that this
> greater control gives people more incentive to follow through on a project
> involving the creation and use of large amounts of RDF data?

I can't speak for anyone else, but in my own case it's like comparing
an RDBMS schema to the data that goes into the tables.  The schema is
useful in a broad sense, and is necessary for applications to talk to
the instance data.  So it's necessary for me to hand out the schema.

On the other hand, the data is usually only useful to the individual
running the application, and may have private or proprietry data.
Either that, or a user may just feel you don't need to know their aunt
Bessie's recipe for meatloaf.  :-)

Admittedly, RDF is not so black and white as this.  It would seem
reasonable to have RDF data which annotates public web pages, and to
make this public.  This would be instance data (annotation instances)
which is also meta-data (annotations are about pages found at URLs).
And it can get hazier still if you try to model a model of data (which
I'm doing at the moment).  However, in most cases I think you'll find
that people are happy to publish the structure of their data (along
with the program that works within that structure), but are not
prepared to share their instance data.

I even have difficulty getting instance data from my co-workers, which
can be really frustrating when I'm trying to add new features or fix a
bug.  :-)

Regards,
Paul

Received on Thursday, 3 August 2006 14:48:52 UTC