Re: call to arms - planting tomatoes

Perfect, you know how to find such things out - Connolly's bane again.
This machine should be able to tell me those things.

On 18 April 2010 16:29, 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
>
>
>



-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Sunday, 18 April 2010 21:07:56 UTC