Re: AW: ANN: LOD Cloud - Statistics and compliance with best practices

At 15:45 -0400 21/10/10, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>On 10/21/10 3:23 PM, Enrico Motta wrote:
>>Chris
>>
>>I strongly agree with the points made by Martin and Giovanni.  Of 
>>course the LOD initiative has had a lot of positive impact and you 
>>cannot be blamed for being successful, but at the some time I am 
>>worried that teh success and visibility of the LOD cloud is having 
>>some rather serious negative consequences. Specifically:
>>
>>1) lots of people, even within the SW community, now routinely 
>>describe the LOD as the 'semantic web'.  This is not only 
>>dramatically incorrect (and bad for students and people who want to 
>>know about the SW) but also an obstacle to progress: anything which 
>>is not in the LOD diagram does not exist, and this is really not 
>>good for the SW community as a whole (including the people at the 
>>centre of the LOD initiative).  Even worse, in the past 12-18 
>>months  I have noticed that this viewpoint has also been embraced 
>>by funding bodies and linking to LOD is becoming a necessary 
>>condition for a SW project. Again, I think this is undesirable - 
>>see also Martin's email on this thread.
>
>I agree, but do note (as per my earlier response) the success of the 
>LOD cloud pictorial as marketing collateral isn't something that 
>arisen by deliberate exclusion actions. Methinks many have simply 
>slapped it into their presentations devoid of actual presentation 
>goals. This single activity has helped and hurt the LOD cloud 
>pictorial. Hurt meaning: creating the perception you describe above.

Absolutely! I never said (and I would never say) that there was any 
deliberate exclusion. I am just pointing out that this is a negative 
side-effect of the success of the activity.


>>
>>2) Because the LOD is perceived as the 'official SW' and because 
>>resources in the LOD have to comply with a number of guidelines, 
>>people also assume that LOD resources exhibit higher quality.
>
>I hope not, and I don't think so. Even if it were to be true, would 
>you blame the production of the pictorial for that? Really though, I 
>don't recall anyone saying: LOD pictorial is the Linked Data gospel.


Again, there is no blaming involved. I am just saying that because 
there is a methodology associated with LOD and methodologies are 
normally associated with quality, people assume quality when quality 
is not (necessarily) there.

>
>>Unfortunately in our experience this is not really the case, and 
>>this also generates negative consequences. That is, if LOD is the 
>>'official high quality SW ' and there are so many issues with the 
>>data, automatically people assume that the rest of the SW is a lot 
>>worse, even though this is not necessarily the case.
>>
>>So, as other people have already said, maybe it is time to 
>>re-examine teh design criteria for LOD and the way this is 
>>presented?
>
>But this should simple be a case of people from the community 
>producing additional collateral. The LOD cloud has some interesting 
>history that goes something like this:
>
>1. Banff 2007 (Linked Data coming out party)  -- Chris was giving a 
>DBpedia demo showing its inter-connectedness, TimBL then suggest to 
>Chris to turn it into a cloud with periodic updates for 
>demonstrating growth
>
>2. Richard (working with Chris at the time) picked up the challenge 
>and refined the initial graphic
>
>3. People started using it to show growth of DBpedia which also 
>implied LOD cloud since the connections in the pictorial were 
>reciprocal
>
>4. Cloud pictorial caught fire re. powerpoint presentations + 
>exponential effect of slideshare.
>
>Thus, why can others simply emulate this process, based on 
>respective areas of interest?


Of course, they can.

>
>>For instance, it would be beneficial to the community if LOD were 
>>to focus more on quality issues, rather than linking for the sake 
>>of linking.
>
>Who is this LOD entity? You make this entity sound very much like 
>the one represented as a burning-bush when providing instructions 
>Moses :-)

Uhm...I know you are saying this in a jokey way, but I don't think I 
am trying to characterise it as a burning bush.....And, unless we are 
all dreaming, I would argue that a LOD initiative does exist......


>>
>>>I agree with you that it would be much better, if somebody would set up a
>>>crawler, properly crawl the Web of Data and then provide a catalog about all
>>>datasets.
>>
>>Actually this is exactly what our Watson system does, see 
>>http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk
>
>And I would assume there are APIs or even a SPARQL endpoint that 
>would enable interested parties generate a dynamic cloud, right?

Of course, there is SPARQL and a very fine-grained and efficient API. 
In addition, we are working on automatically generating a variety of 
links between semantic resources, e.g., agreement/disagreement, 
versioning, inclusion, inconsistency, etc.... - see 
http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk/DownloadsAndPublications_files/keod09.pdf 
for an overview of the overall framework and 
http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk/DownloadsAndPublications_files/ontoqual2010.pdf 
for an example of the approach, which focuses on characterizing and 
automatically detecting agreement and disagreement between ontologies.


Enrico

>


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Received on Thursday, 21 October 2010 22:46:13 UTC