Re: There's No Money in Linked Data

(not sure why this, which I wrote ages ago, is sitting again 
in a window on my computer. Apologies if it was already sent before!).


Short version: Please change LD to LOD throughout.

A little while ago,  when we had made the 5* linked data  mug, 
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/diagrams/lod/480759174v0_350x350_Back.jpg
I got a valid objection to it from the people doing
for example enterprise linked data that their client's
data was generally extremely confidential and no way
would it be open, and the 5 star principle were really
valuable for interoperability, but the clients were scared
off by the fact that they could not even get one star without being open.

So that led to a big change, and more careful wording
and a (then) new mug. 
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/diagrams/lod/597992118v2_350x350_Back.jpg

 The new mug has in black, the Linked Data story, and in green, stamped on 
"OPEN"  to make the "Linked Data" become "Linked Open Data",
and also in green "Open Licence" added to the requirements for the first star.
So the mug works two ways.
Without the green, it is about Linked Data (LD).
 If you include the green (e.g. wearing rose-coloured spectacles)
it becomes a recipe for Linked Open Data (LOD).

To have even 1 star, Linked Open Data must have an open licence.
other wise it is not Linked Open Data at all.

Meanwhile, 5* linked data (like my financial data
for my taxes) can be completely private.

The ability to discuss the different star levels of
Linked Data is important too.  

This distinction has been really important
to a lot of people's understanding and to the
businesses in the space.

So when your article is ONLY about the openness,
about the need for linked Open data to be open,
it is a big problem that you use the wrong term!

There is lots of money in Enterprise Application Integration
which is not what you are doing.

I would ask you to update the paper.
I strongly suggest you update the PDFs you have in place with
a back-link to the original.

Please edit the paper and basically put "Linked Open Data" and  LOD wherever you are
talking about it, not "Linked Data" and LD.

Because the points that you make are generally important
and interesting and I'd like to be able to point to the paper.

I have other comments about the actual content, but
this is more important.

The title... must be something more appropriate
"Commercial use of Linked Open Data stymied by Licence Issues"
"LOD re-use plagued by lack of suitable licence"
"Viral or missing licenses hamper LOD uptake"
... or something....

Thanking you in advance.

Tim



On 2013-05 -17, at 22:13, Pascal Hitzler wrote:

> We just finished a piece indicating serious legal issues regarding the commercialization of Linked Data - this may be of general interest, hence the post. We hope to stimulate discussions on this issue (hence the provokative title).
> 
> Available from
> http://knoesis.wright.edu/faculty/pascal/pub/nomoneylod.pdf
> 
> Abstract.
> Linked Data (LD) has been an active research area for more than 6 years and many aspects about publishing, retrieving, linking, and cleaning Linked Data have been investigated. There seems to be a broad and general agreement that in principle LD datasets can be very useful for solving a wide variety of problems ranging from practical industrial analytics to highly specific research problems. Having these notions in mind, we started exploring the use of notable LD datasets such as DBpedia, Freebase, Geonames and others for a commercial application. However, it turns out that using these datasets in realistic settings is not always easy. Surprisingly, in many cases the underlying issues are not technical but legal barriers erected by the LD data publishers. In this paper we argue that these barriers are often not justified, detrimental to both data publishers and users, and are often built without much consideration of their consequences.
> 
> Authors:
> Prateek Jain, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Chitra Venkatramani
> 
> -- 
> Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler
> Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
> pascal@pascal-hitzler.de   http://www.knoesis.org/pascal/
> Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org
> Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 23 May 2013 15:19:46 UTC