Re: Silk - Link Discovery Framework Version 2.4 release

Hi, 

I don't usually write to this list, and have no idea what SILK is about (Sorry SILK people!), but I found the below email to be incredibly harsh. 

Look at the git history of the project (which was 1 click way from the email I am referring to below!), it does seem to be in active development, with a number of committers: 

http://www.assembla.com/code/silk/git/node/logs?page=1  (apache license 2.0)

And the page DOES seem to reflect this: 

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/ 

Perhaps there was a bug in the HTML(?), I don't know - but I would give people the benefit of the doubt before pointing fingers in public. I do think a personal email to Robert would probably have sufficed, but perhaps I am just that way inclined. 

I have recently unsubscribed from a few of the SW based mailing lists because of trolling and people being incredibly rude - and I hope I don't have to remove myself from any others. The Semantic Web community is full of a great number of nice, helpful, intelligent people, and I find it a pleasure and an honour to be involved with this international community of awesome....  Lots of people put lots of time and effort into writing open specs and open-source code - and i don't see how finger pointing helps anyone!

Mischa

http://mmt.me.uk/ 

On 1 Jun 2011, at 16:16, Paola Di Maio wrote:

> Robert
> 
> thanks  lot for the update, I look forward to be trying it out
> 
> I see from this page
> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
> 
> that SILK V 2.4, announced on this list today was actually released
> last year: See the snippet below
> 
> 2010-06-01: Version 2.4 released including the new Silk Workbench, a
> web application which guides the user through the process of
> interlinking different data sources.
> 
> I also seem to understand from the project page that much of LOD2
> software are tools developed in previous years (ie, nothing new!)
> 
> Am I reading something wrong?
> 
> In the past decade or so, millions of euros of tax payers money have
> been paid for projects for which the codebase had already been
> developed, either by funded projects from prior calls( ie, for which
> the tax payer had already paid ) or by other companies.
> 
> In essence, as it has been already pointed out, the public has been
> paying for the same semantic web tools to be rebranded over and over,
> and each time it has costed lots of public money, and each time it has
> not delivered the semantic web functionality the public is waiting for
> (ie, a useable web based application layer)
> 
> Since LOD2 has become a funded EU project in September 2010, I would
> be grateful if you could explain what part of the tool/functionality
> has been developed after September 2010, and for what part of this
> development is the public funding being used for
> 
> 
> Thanks a lot in advance
> 
> PDM
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Robert Isele <robertisele@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> we are happy to announce version 2.4 of the Silk - Link Discovery
>> Framework for the Web of Data.
>> 
>> The central idea of the Web of Data is to interlink data items using
>> RDF links. However, in practice most data sources are not sufficiently
>> interlinked with related data sources. The Silk Link Discovery
>> Framework addresses this problem by providing tools to generate links
>> between data items based on user-provided link specifications. It can
>> be used by data publishers to generate links between datasets as well
>> as by Linked Data consumers to augment Web data with additional RDF
>> links.
>> 
>> Link specifications can either be written manually or developed using
>> the new Silk Workbench. The Silk Workbench, is a web application which
>> guides the user through the process of interlinking different data
>> sources. It’s being shipped with the 2.4 version of Silk.
>> The Silk Workbench offers the following features:
>> - It enables the user to manage different sets of data sources and
>> linking tasks.
>> - It offers a graphical editor which enables the user to easily create
>> and edit link specifications.
>> - As finding a good linking heuristics is usually an iterative
>> process, the Silk Workbench makes it possible for the user to quickly
>> evaluate the links which are generated by the current link
>> specification.
>> - It allows the user to create and edit a set of reference links used
>> to evaluate the current link specification.
>> 
>> The Silk Link Discovery Framework includes three applications to
>> execute the link specifications which address different use cases:
>> 1. Silk Single Machine is used to generate RDF links on a single
>> machine. The datasets that should be interlinked can either reside on
>> the same machine or on remote machines which are accessed via the
>> SPARQL protocol. Silk Single Machine provides multithreading and
>> caching. In addition, the performance can be further enhanced using an
>> optional blocking feature.
>> 2. Silk Server can be used as an identity resolution component within
>> applications that consume Linked Data from the Web. Silk Server
>> provides an HTTP API for matching instances from an incoming stream of
>> RDF data while keeping track of known entities. It can be used for
>> instance together with a Linked Data crawler to populate a local
>> duplicate-free cache with data from the Web.
>> 3. Silk MapReduce is used to generate RDF links between datasets using
>> a cluster of multiple machines. Silk MapReduce is based on Hadoop and
>> can for instance be run on Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Silk MapReduce
>> enables Silk to scale out to very big datasets by distributing the
>> link generation to multiple machines.
>> 
>> More information about the Silk framework, the Silk Link Specification
>> Language, as well as several examples that demonstrate how Silk is
>> used to set links between different data sources in the LOD cloud is
>> found at:
>> 
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
>> 
>> The Silk framework is provided under the terms of the Apache License,
>> Version 2.0 and can be downloaded from
>> 
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/releases/
>> 
>> The development of Silk was supported by Vulcan Inc. as part of its
>> Project Halo (www.projecthalo.com) and by the EU FP7 project LOD2 -
>> Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data (http://lod2.eu/, Ref. No.
>> 257943).
>> 
>> Thanks to  Christian Becker, Michal Murawicki and Andrea Matteini for
>> contributing to the Silk Workbench.
>> 
>> Happy linking,
>> 
>> Robert Isele, Anja Jentzsch and Chris Bizer
>> 
>> 
>