RE: call to arms - planting tomatoes

Glass half empty or half full?  I look at the massive amounts of data that
people have and use s-l-o-w-l-y and say "how can we do it faster or more
effectively?"  In the world of things, nearly every industry has a
significant base of granular facts and standards -  rug makers have knots
per inch and dye sources; pottery makers have types of clay, glazes, firing
temperatures; seed vendors have types of plants and soil, grow zones, etc.
Or, as recently came up in my life, how many linear shelf feet (rather than
box cu feet) are there in competing refrigerators of the same general
dimensions.  That's a world of opportunity to reduce the amount of time
folks spend drowning in data at home or work and a world of commercial
opportunity presumably more than sufficient to win hearts, minds, and
dollars.  But, just as the vast majority of the population cannot look at an
apartment with black walls and visualize what it will look like with white
walls, nor can they look at "Grace is the mother of Anne" and intuit what
that means for government or industry.  I'm also optimistic in believing
that lots more resources and instances will provide the fodder needed to
solve the next harder problems (e.g., somehow including personal opinions of
the regional representative you describe).

 

I guess this really comes down to two different questions: 1) how to get
more folks engaged in linked data as we know it now? 2) how the visionaries,
as you all are, should envision extending the boundaries of that capability?

 

-k

 

 

  _____  

From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of adasal
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2010 11:00 AM
To: K. Krasnow Waterman
Cc: Dan Brickley; Danny Ayers; Semantic Web
Subject: Re: call to arms - planting tomatoes

 

Utility value:-
Actually I was on a walk the end of last year with someone who had been the
editor for agricultural affairs on BBC World Service. I hope I have the
correct title. This was cut as the BBC thought that agricultural news was
covered in current affairs programs if it was significant enough.
He pointed out to me that agricultural news is not current affairs. What
happened in the agricultural programs was that if, say, a seed supplier
introduced a new seed then the use and benefits of this could be discussed
by having a few people from different regions on air.
I have to say at this point I cannot see any semantic web alternative to
this for the obvious reason that the radio is accessible, the internet is
not.
Moreover, such a regional representative discussion (they would be experts
in local conditions) cannot easily be replicated either.
That said, I'm sure the semantic web will have some contribution to make in
this area?

Adam

On 18 April 2010 15:29, K. Krasnow Waterman <kkw@mit.edu> wrote:

Perhaps I'm too literal, but when I think about linked data, I think about
linking existing data (rather than having it created in response to a
request, as social networking would require), and mostly about collapsing
lots of searches into one.

So, assuming Danny's request doesn't literally mean "my" tomatoes (as in,
guess which varietal and what state they're in now), here are the searches
I'd expect to do today and the results I'd hope linked data could bring me.


1) Find a tomato grow zone map or database (see, e.g.,
http://www.tomatofest.com/tomato-growing-zone-map.html)

2) Find my location on that map and fetch my zone number

3) Find out the names of tomatoes that grow in my zone number

4) Get basic adjectives about those varieties (e.g., sweet, thin-skinned,
drought-resistant)

5)a) Find the "planting season" for each variety for my zone number
OR
5)b)i) Find out how long it takes for each variety to grow from seedling to
fruit-bearing
AND
5)b)ii) Find out how long it takes for each variety to grow from seed to
seedling (this info tends to be provided in different places from #4)

6) "Rinse and repeat".  Grow zone maps have variation (by seed vendor and
gardening expert), so I'd typically look at a few and work out a blended
average sort of understanding.

7) Build a little table that puts this together (which would be so much
better than the notes I scratch on the back of an envelope while I'm
reading)

Today this would probably take me 2+ hours of searching.

I understand that there's no magic to producing this as a linked data query
(no NLP that's going to produce my query so clearly and no algorithm that's
going to implement it so perfectly), but I think building out more of these
as demonstrations lets the business and government communities see the
efficiency, effectiveness, and user wow factor.  If Burpee can help
prospective gardeners reduce the time to understanding from hours to
moments, won't they expect significantly more "conversions" from hits and
reap the "first mover advantage"?  That's what provides the incentive for
bigger players to publish more data, build more linked queries, and spend
resources on the bigger picture -- my answer for an early question in the
thread of last few days about how to get more engagement.

Thanks, -k



-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Dan Brickley
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2010 9:17 AM
To: Danny Ayers
Cc: Semantic Web
Subject: Re: call to arms

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 April 2010 12:54, Michael Schneider <schneid@fzi.de> wrote:
>> Danny Ayers wrote:
>>
>>>when do I plant my tomatoes?
>>
>> We are in early Spring now. Tomatoes don't grow well in this period. At
>> least not in the outside. Well, you can find them in the greenhouse, but
>> that's probably not what you are looking for. So, I'm afraid, you have to
be
>> patient.
>
> Thank you Michael, but I wish to make you redundant. This box of
> circuits in front of me should have told me that.
>
> Did you take into consideration that I live on this side of the
> Garfagnana valley?

When I think about linked information these days, I see three major
flavours:

* information in classic document form (analog stuff made of bits;
human-oriented prose, video, imagery)
* information in source-attributed RDF claims (aka Linked Data, quads, etc)
* information in people's heads

For me, the RDFWeb/FOAF story I think has always been about the 3-way
relationship between these different equally important ways of
learning about the world. Linked people *and* linked information.

You can think of lots of aspects of SemWeb as positioned as edges of
this simple triangle where the nodes are the categories above. RDF
syntaxes, GRDDL for microformats, RDFa, Adobe XMP, ebook metadata,
Dublin Core etc are often links between classic document forms and RDF
quads. Sometimes RDF quads are more to summarise what the document
says about the world; other times they are to help find it. Similarly,
provenance, authorship and other people-describing RDF, also
people-describing non-RDF information, can all help us to find whose
*head* might have the right information. A YouTube video can capture
something of a person's subjective knowledge of the world and put it
out there in document form for others to find; tags and RDF stuff can
help others find that video and either learn directly or get in touch.
SemWeb people (all of us) can easily focus only on one of these forms
of information, at the expense not only of the other two, but their
rich interconnections. Machine-unfriendly video, images, audio or .xls
files can still be very useful, and the 'RDF as metadata about files'
use case is one we too easily neglect.

> Did you take into consideration that I live on this side of the Garfagnana
valley?

In this case I think the answer is best found in the heads of your
neighbours, rather than on the Web. How's your Italian coming along?

cheers,

Dan