Kingsley,
On 8/18/2011 1:52 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
On 8/18/11 1:40 PM, Patrick Durusau wrote:
Kingsley,
From below:
This critical value only materializes via appropriate "context
lenses". For decision makers it is always via opportunity costs. If
someone else is eating you lunch by disrupting your market you
simply have to respond. Thus, on this side of the fence its better
to focus on eating lunch rather than warning about the possibility
of doing so, or outlining how it could be done. Just do it!
I appreciate the sentiment, "Just do it!" as my close friend Jack
Park says it fairly often.
But "Just do it!" doesn't answer the question of cost/benefit.
I mean: just start eating the lunch i.e., make a solution that takes
advantage of an opportunity en route to market disruption. Trouble
with the Semantic Web is that people spend too much time arguing and
postulating. Ironically, when TimBL worked on the early WWW, his
mindset was: just do it! :-)
Still dodging the question I see. ;-)
It avoids it in favor of advocacy.
See my comments above. You are skewing my comments to match you
desired outcome, methinks.
You reach that conclusion pretty frequently.
I ask for hard numbers, you say that isn't your question and/or skewing
your comments.
Example: Privacy controls and Facebook. How much would it cost to
solve this problem?
I assume you know the costs of the above.
It won't cost north of a billion dollars to make a WebID based
solution. In short, such a thing has existed for a long time,
depending on your "context lenses" .
I assume everyone here is familiar with: http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID ?
So we need to take the number of users who have a WebID and subtract
that from the number of FaceBook users.
Yes?
The remaining number need a WebID or some substantial portion, yes?
So who bears that cost? Each of those users? It cost each of them
something to get a WebID. Yes?
What is their benefit from getting that WebID? Will it outweigh their
cost in their eyes?
Then, what increase in revenue will result from solving it?
FB -- less vulnerability and bleed.
Startups or Smartups: massive opportunity to make sales by solving a
palpable problem.
Or if Facebook's lunch is going to be eaten, say by G+, then why
doesn't G+ solve the problem?
G+ is trying to do just that, but in the wrong Web dimension. That's
why neither G+ nor FB have been able to solve the identity
reconciliation riddle.
Maybe you share your observations with G and FB. ;-)
Seriously, I don't think they are as dumb as everyone seems to think.
It may well be they have had this very discussion and decided it isn't
cost effective to address.
Are privacy controls are a non-problem?
Your "context lenses."
True, you can market a product/service that no one has ever seen
before. Like pet rocks.
And they "just did it!"
With one important difference.
Their *doing it* did not depend upon the gratuitous efforts of
thousands if not millions of others.
Don't quite get your point. I am talking about a solution that starts
off with identity reconciliation, passes through access control lists,
and ultimately makes virtues of heterogeneous data virtualization
clearer re. data integration pain alleviation.
In the above we have a market place north of 100 Billion Dollars.
Yes, but your solution: "...starts off with identity reconciliation..."
Sure, start with the critical problem already solved and you really are
at a "...market place north of 100 Billion Dollars...", but that is all
in your imagination.
Having a system of assigned and reconciled WebIDs isn't a zero cost to
users or businesses solution. It is going to cost someone to assign and
reconcile those WebIDs. Yes?
Since it is your solution, may I ask who is going to pay that cost?
Isn't that an important distinction?
Yes, and one that has never been lost on me :-)
Interested to hear your answer since that distinction has never been
lost on you.
Patrick
Kingsley
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
On 8/18/2011 10:54 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
On 8/18/11 10:25 AM, Patrick Durusau wrote:
Kingsley,
Your characterization of "problems" is spot on:
On 8/18/2011 9:01 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
<snip>
Linked Data addresses many real world problems. The trouble is
that problems are subjective. If you have experienced a problem it
doesn't exist. If you don't understand a problem it doesn't exist.
If you don't know a problem exists then again it doesn't exist in
you context.
But you left out: The recognized "problem" must *cost more* than
the cost of addressing it.
Yes. Now in my case I assumed the above to be implicit when context
is about a solution or solutions :-)
If a solution costs more than the problem, it is a problem^n matter.
No good.
A favorable cost/benefit ratio has to be recognized by the people
being called upon to make the investment in solutions.
Always! Investment evaluation 101 for any business oriented decision
maker.
That is recognition of a favorable cost/benefit ratio by the W3C
and company is insufficient.
Yes?
Yes-ish. And here's why. Implementation cost is a tricky factor, one
typically glossed over in marketing communications that more often
than not blind side decision makers; especially those that are
extremely technically challenged. Note, when I say "technically
challenged" I am not referring to programming skills. I am referring
to basic understanding of technology as it applies to a given domain
e.g. the enterprise.
Back to the W3C and "The Semantic Web Project". In this case, the
big issue is that degree of unobtrusive delivery hasn't been a
leading factor -- bar SPARQL where its deliberate SQL proximity is
all about unobtrusive implementation and adoption. Ditto R2RML .
RDF is an example of a poorly orchestrated revolution at the syntax
level that is implicitly obtrusive at adoption and implementation
time. It is in this context I agree fully with you. There was a
misconception that RDF would be adopted like HTML, just like that.
As we can all see today, that never happened and will never happened
via revolution.
What can happen, unobtrusively, is the use and appreciation of
solutions that generate Linked Data (expressed using a variety of
syntaxes and serialized in a variety of formats). That's why we've
invested so much time in both Linked Data Middleware and DBMS
technology for ingestion, indexing, querying, and serialization.
For the umpteenth time here are three real world problems
addressed effectively by Linked Data courtesy of AWWW
(Architecture of the World Wide Web):
1. Verifiable Identifiers -- as delivered via WebID (leveraging
Trust Logic and FOAF)
2. Access Control Lists -- an application of WebID and Web Access
Control Ontology
3. Heterogeneous Data Access and Integration -- basically taking
use beyond the limits of ODBC, JDBC etc..
Let's apply the items above to some contemporary solutions that
illuminate the costs of not addressing the above:
1. G+ -- the "real name" debacle is WebID 101 re. pseudonyms,
synonyms, and anonymity
2. Facebook -- all the privacy shortcomings boil down to not
understanding the power of InterWeb scale verifiable identifiers
and access control lists
3. Twitter -- inability to turn Tweets into structured annotations
that are basically nano-memes
4. Email, Comment, Pingback SPAM -- a result of not being able to
verify identifiers
5. Precision Find -- going beyond the imprecision of Search
Engines whereby subject attribute and properties are used to
contextually discover relevant things (explicitly or
serendipitously).
The problem isn't really a shortage of solutions, far from it.
For the sake of argument only, conceding these are viable
solutions, the question is:
Do they provide more benefit than they cost?
Yes. They do, unequivocally.
If that can't be answered favorably, in hard currency (or some
other continuum of value that appeals to particular investors), no
one is going to make the investment.
Economics 101.
This critical value only materializes via appropriate "context
lenses". For decision makers it is always via opportunity costs. If
someone else is eating you lunch by disrupting your market you
simply have to respond. Thus, on this side of the fence its better
to focus on eating lunch rather than warning about the possibility
of doing so, or outlining how it could be done. Just do it!
That isn't specific to SemWeb but any solution to a problem.
Yes!
The solution has to provide a favorable cost/benefit ratio or it
won't be adopted. Or at least not widely.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
patr...@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau
