- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:32:55 -0400
- To: Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>
- CC: semantic-web@w3.org
On 06/18/2013 05:58 AM, Norman Gray wrote: > I've given a couple of lectures on 'the semantic web and linked data' > to librarians/archivists/museum people. They're interested^Wobsessed > by structured information, but largely uninterested in technology as > such. They rather glaze when I talk about RDF and ontologies, but > they _get_ Linked Data when I phrase it as 'the linked data web is > the web for machines; it has the same good/bad/pragmatic > sociotechnical features as the human-readable web, but because it's > all RDF rather than all HTML, the machines can follow their noses > just like we can on the human-readable web'. > > Phrased like that, or something like it, they can imagine its use in > their practice, and why it's important. Yes! I could not agree more, except for one point. The reason this debate arose was because a W3C technical specification -- the JSON-LD spec -- was proposing to include a *definition* of Linked Data. And that is very different than trying to convey a rough idea of Linked Data to a non-technical audience. To my mind, if Linked Data is defined in a W3C technical specification -- *especially* if that spec is coming from the RDF working group -- then the definition needs to be complete and correct -- not merely suggestive. We can of course debate the details of what that definition should be, but that's a different matter. David
Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2013 13:33:22 UTC