On Sep 4, 2013, at 9:27 AM, Shaun Ellis <sha...@princeton.edu> wrote:
> I get the basic concepts of linked data. But what I don't understand is > why the idea has been around so long, yet there seems to be a dearth of > useful applications that live up to the hype. So, what I want to learn > about linked data is: who's using it effectively? Maybe there's lots of > stuff out there that I just don't know about? I've been doing some reading and evaluating in the regard to Linked Data [0], and I think the problem is multi-diminentional: * when people create Linked Data they all too often do not necessarily use URIs from other linked data sets or the URIs are not persistent * there is not a critical mass Linked Data available for the killer app to be demonstrated; the chicken & egg problem * encoding data/information/knowledge in the form of triples (whether it be RDF/XML, Turtle, or N3) is not trivial, let alone easy to understand despite the fact that there are only three parts * vocabularies get in the way; there does not seem to be a clear cut way of deciding what semantic(s) to use for describing things. FOAF? Dublin Core? Etc. I call this the Tower Of Babel problem * our (everybody's) data is dirty, inconsistent, or manifests a wide variety of integrity issues. People can tolerate this sort of ambiguity. Computers can't. [0] beginnings of a Linked Data guidebook - http://sites.tufts.edu/liam/2013/08/08/liam-guidebook/ -- Eric Lease Morgan