Michael Brunnbauer wrote:
And publishers will start to differenciate between dogs and pictures of dogs as
soon as it provides them added value.
I think in this lies a key issue. Much of my experience of producing
linked data has been anti-climatic. If I was having to justify every
coding hour then it's hard to say the providing public open data really
gained much value for our business.
What would be really nice is some public services which consume RDF and
produce something useful, so that people actually get a direct value out
of putting out linked data.
One of my unfunded, background projects is programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk --
I'm working on a PHP library which will consume the RDF and produce a
nice big part of an HTML website for a conference from it, along with
mobile interfaces & tools like a "print out a schedule to go on the door
of each room each day" and "check you didn't double book a speaker".
Plus a tool to author the data in a spreadsheet and convert that into RDF.
The goal is to get people creating nice RDF data for their conferences
because it makes their lives easier, not because it's the right thing.
Hopefully in the next year or two it'll hit a tipping point and we'll
get some third party tools working with the data and it'll be a really
useful format.
You can see a prototype of the PHP library in action on this conference
site:
http://data.dev8d.org/2011/programme/
I'd encourage the community to build more tools for webmasters, not for
the linked data community!
--
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248
You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/