- From: Enrico Motta <e.motta@open.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:45:18 +0100
- To: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
- Cc: Enrico Motta <e.motta@open.ac.uk>, Chris Bizer <chris@bizer.de>, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>, Thomas Steiner <tsteiner@google.com>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>, public-lod <public-lod@w3.org>, Anja Jentzsch <anja@anjeve.de>, semanticweb <semanticweb@yahoogroups.com>, Giovanni Tummarello <giovanni.tummarello@deri.org>, Mathieu d'Aquin <m.daquin@open.ac.uk>
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 > -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
Received on Thursday, 21 October 2010 22:46:13 UTC