RE: RDFa + RDF/XML Considered Harmful? (was RE: Ordnance Survey data as Linked Data)

Hey Dan, 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@danbri.org] 
> Sent: 14 July 2008 20:48
> To: Tom Heath
> Cc: Richard Cyganiak; Mark Birbeck; public-lod@w3.org; 
> semantic-web@w3.org
> Subject: Re: RDFa + RDF/XML Considered Harmful? (was RE: 
> Ordnance Survey data as Linked Data)
> 
> Tom Heath wrote:
> 
> > 
> > As always it's a case of the right tool for the right job. 
> Regarding 
> > your other (admittedly unfounded) claim, there may be many 
> more people 
> > who end up publishing RDF as RDFa, but collectively they may end up 
> > publishing far fewer triples in total than a small number of 
> > publishers with very large data sets who choose to use RDF/XML to 
> > expose data from backend DBs.
> 
> Hey, size isn't everything :)

I'm not claiming it is. Quite the opposite in fact. Mark said this:

"metadata publishers as a percentage of the number of people publishing
web-pages on the web, is probably very small"

As you say, size (of user base) isn't everything. This was my point. I
chose the example of publishing large data sets to emphasise the
'different tools for different jobs' message. I'm not making any claims
about any relationship between size (of user base, data set, whatever)
and some notion of 'value'.
 
> Generating a massive RDF dataset is as easy as piping one's 
> HTTP logs through sed. There are many measures for data 
> utility. Is the data fresh? accurate? useful? maintained? 
> *used*? Does it exploit well known vocab? Does it use 
> identifiers that other people use? Or identification 
> strategies that allow cross-reference with other data anyway? 
> Are the associated http servers kept patched and secure? Is 
> it available over SSL? Is there at least 5 years paid up on 
> each associated DNS hostname used? Do we know who owns and 
> takes care of those domain names? Does it link out? do people 
> link in? Does the data have clear license? And respect user's 
> privacy wishes where appropriate? Is it I18N-cool?

Thanks, but you don't need to tell me these things :)

> On the size questsion: I'm wary of encouraging a 'bigger is better' 
> attitude to triple count.

Totally agreed, but I'm not sure anyone is doing this.

Cheers,

Tom.

Received on Tuesday, 15 July 2008 09:53:48 UTC