Re: A new Semantic Web logo?

Benji

Thanks for the detailed explanation, and apologies for my 
quick-tempered, "out-of-box" first reaction that I aknowledged was 
unecessarily rude, and, well, er ... silly :-) .
I won't elaborate on the process, others did. But just to go further on 
the "open the box" vs "link the nodes" taglines.
When I wrote "I like nodes and links", it's because I'm deeply convinced 
that the main added value of the SW technologies is in qualified links 
between existing resource nodes. You can open your data and publish them 
in a perfectly SW-conformant way, but if you do that using only your own 
URIs, language and terminology, indeed you opened the box, but no one 
can make sense of what comes out of it.
On the other hand, look at the Linking Open Data initiative, and how it 
stresses in its communication the linking aspects - both social and 
technical aspects. And, AFAIK, the LOD initiative is so far what is 
closer to a real-world semantic web. No?

So, to be constructive, I would have liked a logo and tagline stressing 
both the "opening" and the "linking" aspects. Maybe the blue RDF 
triangle is too much focused on linking and not enough on opening.
Actually the FOAF logo made it quite nicely in capturing that.

Best

Bernard

Benjamin Nowack a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> Let me try to explain the process we went through, and I'll also try
> to address some of the usage-related concerns (Ian, please correct 
> me if I'm wrong). This is going to become a long mail, I fear..
>
> Note: I'm just an invited geek to the SWEO group. I'm neither a
> W3C member nor a member of the communications team. I can't speak for
> them, but I'm happy to collect any constructive feedback and forward
> it. (The chosen SemWeb logo isn't even one of the proposals I made,
> so don't think I'm defending it for personal reasons.)
>
> First: Don't panic, please. The logos are up for two days now, after 
> more than six months of fights, creating drafts, and gathering
> feedback from several W3C groups. I don't agree with the current 
> usage wording either, but we tried to push things quite a bit from 
> the SWEO side, so I assume that's why the Comm team kept the 
> guidelines more restrictive for now. The overall objective is to 
> develop a branding and marketing strategy for the Semantic Web, as 
> developed by the various W3C groups and the SemWeb community. 
> If there are issues with how the visual elements are supposed to
> be used, then let's just discuss and solve them. Something like 
> the RDF icon usge ("if appropriate, link to ...") for example sounds
> quite good to me. Anyway, it's still *very* early (look at the sw 
> activity homepage, even they didn't properly incorporate the 
> logo yet and get rid of the non-transparent white background).
>
> The SemWeb logo is *not* a replacement for the great RDF icon
> or other (future) technology logos. It's a technology-independent
> addition. And it makes sense to keep the SemWeb logo separate 
> from the technologies. One of the first reactions on this list was
> that people wanted to replace their RDF download icons with the 
> SemWeb one. That's what should *not* happen. That's not what 
> it's for.
>
> It could make sense, however, to use the semweb icon as an 
> identifier for extended functionality, e.g. for semantically 
> enhanced links. That's one of the usage questions I had, and the
> Comm team said, that'd most probably be fine. So, let's talk and
> clarify, not scream. Give them some time to align the branding
> plans with our suggestions.
>
> And, we are all so gifted when it comes to nit-picking, let's 
> see what the "usage" paragraph says *exactly*: 
>    "without requesting permission [...] provided that [...]".
>
> So, this doesn't exclude other uses, it just plays it safe for
> now and asks for confirmation, which I think is fair, given 
> the amount of work that went into the whole branding effort 
> (of which the icons are just one part).
>
>
> Some background info for the whole branding effort:
>
> We tried to create a logo/button/seal for SWEO-recommended sites
> back in march. That quickly evolved into the idea of creating a 
> logo for the whole SWEO group, plus various sub-logos for the 
> different sub-projects within SWEO. After two months or so of 
> proposals and finally reaching sort-of-consensus just within 
> SWEO, we were approached by the Comm team which suggested to 
> extend the effort and create something for the whole SemWeb 
> initiative instead. We sighed (but also saw the utility)
> and started from scratch. 
>
> We really wanted to accelerate things a little, and yes, we
> knew that doing this behind SWEO doors would cause negative
> reactions. (The process wasn't *that* closed actually, I pinged 
> several working groups, asking for feedback about whether we 
> should create technology-specific logos, a single, generic one,
> or if they wanted a combination. I only received responses from 
> those groups that had people with design skill on board, and 
> they were basically happy with us taking the lead, as long as 
> this would reduce delays.) I personally favoured a more open 
> process when we started, but if I learned one thing in the last 
> months, then it's that everyone is very good at criticizing once
> the work is done (by others, of course), and that you can waste 
> an endless amount of time (it's design, there are infinite options)
> coming up with yet another design proposal and never reaching 
> consensus. (Bernard's comment is a perfect example, although the
> SWEO members were always mannered enough to not get insulting.)
>
> Bottom line: We knew that it'd be impossible to make everyone 
> happy anyway. So, it felt just more reasonable and practical to
> leave the job to the pros. And we were lucky to have them (they
> are still so hard to find in the semweb community). And the logo
> is really a nice one. We saw quite a number of alternative 
> proposals, and I'm confident that the selected logo is going
> to help us successfully promote the Semantic Web idea.
>
> Unleash your data / 
> Think out of the box / 
> There's more inside of the building blocks /
> ...
>
>
> Benji
>
> Congrats, you've reached the end of this mail.
>
> --
> Benjamin Nowack
> http://bnode.org/
>
>
>  
>
>
>
>
>   

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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Received on Monday, 15 October 2007 06:47:56 UTC