Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[AzamatAbdoullaev]

HS: "I gave a talk on the philosophy of the Social Web if you are interested."
 http://www.slideshare.net/bblfish/philosophy-and-the-social-web-5583083

For the specifics of TBL's motto, "the web as a philosophical engineering", see 
Harry's article:
http://www.apaonline.org/publications/newsletters/v07n2_Computers_04.aspx
Some interesting assertions: "we are not analyzing a world, we are building it. 
We are not experimental philosophers, we are philosophical engineers." ; 
"online intelligence is generated through complex causal interaction in an 
extended brain-body-environment system"; "The Web is ...the creation and 
evolution of external representations in a universal information space". 
I'd extend: if the the world wide web is "a universal information space", the 
semantic/ontological web is a universal knowledge space.
And we need avoid confusing four fields: philosophical engineering, philosophy 
of engineering, engineering philosophy, and engineering of philosophy.
Azamat

- Original Message - 
  From: Henry Story 
  To: adasal 
  Cc: Lin Clark ; Bjoern Hoehrmann ; Linked Data community ; Semantic Web 
  Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 8:48 PM
  Subject: Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful




  On 17 Jun 2011, at 19:27, adasal wrote:


That said the hacker is a various beast, 


  Indeed, hackers are not angels. But the people on this list should get back 
to hacking or work together with open source projects to get initial minimal 
working pieces embedded there. WebID is one; foaf is another, pingback, access 
control, ...
  Get the really simple pieces working.


and I wonder if this sort of thing can really be addressed without 
overarching political/ethical/idealogical concerns. It's tough. 


  It all fits together really nicely. I gave a talk on the philosophy of the 
Social Web if you are interested.
   http://www.slideshare.net/bblfish/philosophy-and-the-social-web-5583083


  Hackers tend to be engineers with a political attitude, so they are more 
receptive to the bigger picture. But solving the big picture problem should 
have an easy entry cost if we want to get it going. 


  I talked to the BBC but they have limited themselves to what they will do in 
the Social Web space as far as profile hosting goes. Again, I'd start small. 
Facebook started in universities not that long ago.


  Henry




  Social Web Architect
  http://bblfish.net/

Re: HTTP 302

[Alan Ruttenberg]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 5:35 PM, Nathan  wrote:

> Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Nathan  wrote:
>>
>>  Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
>>>
>>>  One last comment, it's a shame we use a code meaning "See Other"

 You could get a lot of useful mileage out of a 3XX code meaning "Is
 Described By"


  and what if you got two of those 3XX's chained, what would be being
>>> described?
>>>
>>> -> GET /A
>>> -< 30X /B
>>> -> GET /B
>>> -< 30X /C
>>> -> GET /C
>>> -< 200 OK
>>>
>>> does /C describe /A or /B ?
>>>
>>
>> /B (assuming 30X = 303)
>>
>
> Sorry I meant 30X to be a new status code meaning "Is Described By". That
> said, 303 doesn't mean that /C describes anything, it just indicates that
> the requested resource does not have a representation of its own that can be
> transferred by the server over HTTP.


The proposal was that 303 is branded "is described by".


>
>
>  Can you offer an interpretation otherwise?
>>
>
> Well, what if it describes /A, or something else entirely, or nothing at
> all? It seems like a tall ask for a server responding to one URI to say what
> another URI is (specify that another URI describes something) - perhaps the
> weakness of the "see other" statement is an architectural strength in the
> web.
>

In other words, what if we didn't have any protocol.
Then we wouldn't have any ability to predict anything. If you like that sort
of thing in network protocols more power to you. I don't.

-Alan

Re: HTTP 302

[Nathan]

Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Nathan  wrote:


Christopher Gutteridge wrote:


One last comment, it's a shame we use a code meaning "See Other"

You could get a lot of useful mileage out of a 3XX code meaning "Is
Described By"



and what if you got two of those 3XX's chained, what would be being
described?

-> GET /A
-< 30X /B
-> GET /B
-< 30X /C
-> GET /C
-< 200 OK

does /C describe /A or /B ?


/B (assuming 30X = 303)


Sorry I meant 30X to be a new status code meaning "Is Described By". 
That said, 303 doesn't mean that /C describes anything, it just 
indicates that the requested resource does not have a representation of 
its own that can be transferred by the server over HTTP.



Can you offer an interpretation otherwise?


Well, what if it describes /A, or something else entirely, or nothing at 
all? It seems like a tall ask for a server responding to one URI to say 
what another URI is (specify that another URI describes something) - 
perhaps the weakness of the "see other" statement is an architectural 
strength in the web.


Best,

Nathan

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle [was Re: Schema.org in RDF ...]

[Nathan]

Henry Story wrote:

On 17 Jun 2011, at 22:42, Nathan wrote:


You could use the same name for both if each name was always coupled to a 
universe, specified by the predicate, and you cut out type information from 
data, such that:

 :animalname "sasha" ; :created "2011" .

was read as:

Animal() :animalname "sasha" .
Document() :created "2011" .

the ability to do this could be pushed on to ontologies, with domain and range 
and restrictions specifying universes and boundaries - but it's a big change.


No its quite simple in fact, as I pointed out in a couple of e-mails in this 
thread. You just need to be careful when creating relations that certain 
relations are in fact inferred relations between primary topics.


I'd agree, but anything that involves being careful is pretty much 
doomed to failure on the web :p



really, different names for different things is quite simple to stick to,


yes, but there are a lot of people who say it is too complicated. I don't find 
it so, but perhaps it is for their use cases. I say that we describe the option 
they like, find out what the limitations are they will fall have, and document 
it. Then next time we can refer others to that discovery.

So limitations to look for would be limitations as to the complexity of the 
data created. The other limitations is that even on simple blog pages there are 
at least three or four things on the page.


there's also a primary limitation of the programming languages 
developers are using, if they've got locked in stone classes and 
objects, or even just structures, then the dynamics of RDF can be pretty 
hard to both understand mentally, and use practically.



and considering most (virtually all) documents on the web have several 
different elements and identifiable things,


indeed.


the one page one subject thing isn't worth spending too much time focusing on 
as a generic use case, as any solution based on it won't apply to the web at 
large which is very diverse and packed full of lots of potentially identifiable 
things.


agree. But it is one of those things that newbies feel the urge to do, and will 
keep on wanting to do. So perhaps for them one should have special simple 
ontologies or guides for how to build these ObjectDocument ontologies. In any 
case this seems to be the type of thing the microformats people were (are?) 
doing.


hmm.. microformats seems to be pretty focussed on describing multiple 
items on one page, however the singularity is present in that they 
focussed on being described using a single Class Blueprint style, one 
class, a predetermined set of properties belonging to the class, and a 
simple chained heirarchy - this stems from most OO based languages.


With a bit of trickery you can use RDF and OWL the same way, it just 
means you have different "views" over the data, where you can see 
Human(x) with a set of properties, or Male(x) with another set, or 
Administrator(x) with yet another set. This is less about the data 
published and more about how it's consumed viewed and processed though.


Quite sure something can be done with that, where the simple version of 
the data uses a basic schema.org like ontology, and advanced usage is 
more RDF like using multiple ontologies. The "views" thing would be a 
way to merge the two approaches..


Best,

Nathan

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle [was Re: Schema.org in RDF ...]

[Henry Story]

On 17 Jun 2011, at 22:42, Nathan wrote:

> 
> You could use the same name for both if each name was always coupled to a 
> universe, specified by the predicate, and you cut out type information from 
> data, such that:
> 
>  :animalname "sasha" ; :created "2011" .
> 
> was read as:
> 
> Animal() :animalname "sasha" .
> Document() :created "2011" .
> 
> the ability to do this could be pushed on to ontologies, with domain and 
> range and restrictions specifying universes and boundaries - but it's a big 
> change.

No its quite simple in fact, as I pointed out in a couple of e-mails in this 
thread. You just need to be careful when creating relations that certain 
relations are in fact inferred relations between primary topics.

> really, different names for different things is quite simple to stick to,

yes, but there are a lot of people who say it is too complicated. I don't find 
it so, but perhaps it is for their use cases. I say that we describe the option 
they like, find out what the limitations are they will fall have, and document 
it. Then next time we can refer others to that discovery.

So limitations to look for would be limitations as to the complexity of the 
data created. The other limitations is that even on simple blog pages there are 
at least three or four things on the page.

> and considering most (virtually all) documents on the web have several 
> different elements and identifiable things,

indeed.

> the one page one subject thing isn't worth spending too much time focusing on 
> as a generic use case, as any solution based on it won't apply to the web at 
> large which is very diverse and packed full of lots of potentially 
> identifiable things.

agree. But it is one of those things that newbies feel the urge to do, and will 
keep on wanting to do. So perhaps for them one should have special simple 
ontologies or guides for how to build these ObjectDocument ontologies. In any 
case this seems to be the type of thing the microformats people were (are?) 
doing.

Henry


> 
> best, nathan

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Re: HTTP 302

[Alan Ruttenberg]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Nathan  wrote:

> Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
>
>> One last comment, it's a shame we use a code meaning "See Other"
>>
>> You could get a lot of useful mileage out of a 3XX code meaning "Is
>> Described By"
>>
>>
> and what if you got two of those 3XX's chained, what would be being
> described?
>
> -> GET /A
> -< 30X /B
> -> GET /B
> -< 30X /C
> -> GET /C
> -< 200 OK
>
> does /C describe /A or /B ?
>

/B (assuming 30X = 303)
Can you offer an interpretation otherwise?


>
> 303 is a nice loose way of saying "/x may give you more information",
> stressing the "may" in that sentence, as it equally may not.
>
>

Re: HTTP 302

[Nathan]

Christopher Gutteridge wrote:

One last comment, it's a shame we use a code meaning "See Other"

You could get a lot of useful mileage out of a 3XX code meaning "Is 
Described By"




and what if you got two of those 3XX's chained, what would be being 
described?


-> GET /A
-< 30X /B
-> GET /B
-< 30X /C
-> GET /C
-< 200 OK

does /C describe /A or /B ?

303 is a nice loose way of saying "/x may give you more information", 
stressing the "may" in that sentence, as it equally may not.

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle [was Re: Schema.org in RDF ...]

[Nathan]

Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

Pat's knows something about the history of
what's known to work and what isn't. You ignore that history at the peril of
your ideas simply not working.


well said, although I think we could bracket yourself in that category 
too :)

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle [was Re: Schema.org in RDF ...]

[Nathan]

Danny Ayers wrote:

On 16 June 2011 02:26, Pat Hayes  wrote:


If you agree with Danny that a description can be a substitute for the thing it 
describes, then I am waiting to hear how one of you will re-write classical 
model theory to accommodate this classical use/mention error. You might want to 
start by reading Korzybski's 'General Semantics'.


IANAL, but I have heard of the use/mention thing, quite often. I don't
honestly know whether classical model theory needs a rewrite, but I'm
sure it doesn't on the basis of this thread. I also don't know enough
to know whether it's applicable - from your reaction, I suspect not.

As a publisher of information on the Web, I'm pretty much free to say
what I like (cf. Tim's Design Notes). Fish are bicycles. But that
isn't very useful.

But if I say Sasha is some kind of weird Collie-German Shepherd cross,
that has direct relevance to Sasha herself. More, the arcs in my
description between Sasha and her parents have direct correspondence
with the arcs between Sasha and her parents. There is information
common to the reality and the description (at least in human terms).
The description may, when you stand back, be very different in its
nature to the reality, but if you wish to make use of the information,
such common aspects are valuable. We've already established that HTTP
doesn't deal with any kind of "one true" representation. Data about
Sasha's parentage isn't Sasha, but it's closer than a non-committal
303 or rdfs:seeAlso. There's nothing around HTTP that says it can't be
given the same name, and it's a darn sight more useful than a
wave-over-there redirect or a random fish/bike association. I can't
see anything it breaks either.


You could use the same name for both if each name was always coupled to 
a universe, specified by the predicate, and you cut out type information 
from data, such that:


  :animalname "sasha" ; :created "2011" .

was read as:

 Animal() :animalname "sasha" .
 Document() :created "2011" .

the ability to do this could be pushed on to ontologies, with domain and 
range and restrictions specifying universes and boundaries - but it's a 
big change.


really, different names for different things is quite simple to stick 
to, and considering most (virtually all) documents on the web have 
several different elements and identifiable things, the one page one 
subject thing isn't worth spending too much time focusing on as a 
generic use case, as any solution based on it won't apply to the web at 
large which is very diverse and packed full of lots of potentially 
identifiable things.


best, nathan

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Nathan]

you should post to the lists more harry :)

Harry Halpin wrote:

I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.

The reason people are upset are that they didn't use RDFa, but instead
used microdata. One *cannot* argue that Google is ignoring open
standards. RDFa and microdata are *both* Last Call W3C Working Drafts
now. RDFa 1.0 is a spec but only for XHTML 1.0, which is not what most
of the Web uses. Microdata does have RDF parsing bugs, but again, most
developers outside the Semantic Web probably don't care - they want
JSON anyways.

Form what I understand from tevents  where Rich Snippets team has
presented is that RDFa is simply too complicated for ordinary web
developers to use. Google has been deploying Rich Snippets for two
years, claim to have user-studies  and have experience with a large
user-base. This user-driven feedback should be taken on board by both
relevant WGs obviously, HTML and RDFa. Designing technology without
user-feedback leads to odd results (for proof, see many of the fun and
exiciting "httpRange-14" discussions). Which is also why many
practical developers do not use the technology.

But realistically, it's not the RDFa WG's job to do user-studies and
build compelling user-experiences in products. They are only a few
people. Why has the *hundreds* of people in the Semantic Web community
not done such work?

The fact of the matter is that the Semantic Web academic community has
had their priorities skewed to the wrong direction. Had folks been
spending time doing usability testing and focussing on user-feedback
on common problems (such as the rather obvious "vocabulary hosting"
problem) rather than focussing on things with little to no support
with the world outside academia, then we probably would not be in the
situation we are in today. Today, major companies such as Microsoft
(oData) and Google (microdata) are jumping on the "open data"
bandwagon but finding the RDF stack unacceptable. Some of it may be a
"not invented here" syndrome, but as anyone who has actually looked at
RDF/XML can tell you, some of it is hard-to-deny technical reasoning
by companies that have decided that "open data" is a great market but
do not agree with the technical choices made by the  Semantic Web
stack.

This is not to say good things can't come out of the academic
community - the *internet* came out of the academic community. But
seriously, at some point (think of the role of Netscape in getting the
Web going with the magic of images) commercial companies enter the
game. We should be happy now search engines are seeing value in
structured data on the Web.

I would suggest the Semantic Web community take on-board the
"microdata" challenge in two different ways. First of all, start
focussing on user-studies and user experience (not just visual
interfaces, the Semantic Web has more than its share of user-hostile
visual interfaces). It's harder to publish academic papers on these
topics but possible (see SIGCHI), and would help a lot with actual
deployment. Second, we should start focussing more on actual empirical
data-driven feedback, both on what parts of RDF are being used and
common mistakes. With indexes such as the Billion Triple Challenge and
Sindice's index, we can actually do that with the Semantic Web. Third,
why not actually try to get RDF - or "open data more broadly" into the
browser in usable manner? Tabulator may be a step in the right
direction, but the user experience needs work. Fourth, why not start a
company and try to deliver products to actual end-users and give that
feedback to the wider community and W3C WGs (and if you already work
for an actual SemWeb company, please send your feedback from user
studies to the WG before Last Call)? I believe the Semantic Web
research community - which still has tons of funding and lots of
passion - can make the Web better.

Schema.org is not a threat. It's an opportunity to step up. Good luck everyone!

   cheers,
  harry

P.S.: Note this opinions are purely personal and held as an individual.

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Nathan]

could also term it "constrained vs diverse" :)

David Wood wrote:

Hi all,

This thread seems to me to be classic "neat vs. scruffy" argument [1].  I used 
to be a neat, when I was young, foolish and of course selfish.  Now that I am old enough 
to see others' points of view, I have become scruffy.  Either that, or I'm just tired of 
trying to force others to do things my way.

The Web is a scruffy place and that is a feature, not a bug.

Regards,
Dave

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies


On Jun 17, 2011, at 10:27, Kingsley Idehen wrote:


On 6/17/11 2:55 PM, Ian Davis wrote:

BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the

 blog, not the movie it is about.

 AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
 saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.

 And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
 like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
 rating the product.
 So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
 stuff in general about the message not its subject.

As an additional point, a review_is_  a seperate thing, it's not a web
page. It is often contained within a webpage. It seems you are
conflating the two here. Reviews and comments can be and often are
syndicated across multiple sites so clearly any "liking" of the review
needs to flow with it.

Yes, it is a separate thing representable as a Data Object. Now the obvious 
question: what is a Web Page? Isn't that a sourced from Data at an Address 
that's streamed to a client that uses a specific data presentation metaphor as 
basis for user comprehension?

Are the following identical or different, re. URI functionality ?

1. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data
2. http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data
3. http://dbpedia.org/data/Linked_Data.json .

I may want to bookmark: http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data, I may also be 
interested in its evolution over time via services lime memento [1] .

The thing is that re. WWW we have an Information Space dimension and associated 
patterns that's preceded the Data Space dimension and emerging patterns that we 
(this community) are collectively trying to crystallize, in an unobtrusive 
manner.

Links:

1. http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/

--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Nathan]

Kingsley Idehen wrote:

On 6/17/11 3:11 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:

I just had to go and check whether Amazon reviews and Facebook
comments actually do have their own pages. That's because I've never
seen them presented as anything other than objects within another
container, either in a web page or a mobile app. So I think you could
argue that when people are "linking" and marking things as useful,
they're doing that on a more general abstraction, i.e. the "Work" (to
borrow FRBR terminology) not the particular web page.


You have to apply context to your statement above. Is the context: WWW 
as an Information space or Data Space? These contexts can co-exist, but 
we need to allow users context-switch, unobtrusively. Thus,  they have 
to co-exist, and that's why we have to leverage what the full URI 
abstraction delivers. As stated earlier, it doesn't mean others will 
follow or understand immediately, you need more than architecture for 
that;  hence the need for a broad spectrum of solutions that do things 
properly.




and UX challenges, indeed if the ux was addressed first for the 
functionality, then whatever was implemented could be webized and 
standardized - could be a good way to force innovation in this area.

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Nathan]

Ian Davis wrote:

As an additional point, a review _is_ a seperate thing, it's not a web
page. It is often contained within a webpage. It seems you are
conflating the two here. Reviews and comments can be and often are
syndicated across multiple sites so clearly any "liking" of the review
needs to flow with it.


so the "like" data needs to be webized and exposed easily.

also, realtime updates on / streams of such data would come in very 
useful. permissions and visibility would looked at though, so probably 
authentication via webid or other would be needed too.

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Nathan]

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to 
like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from

rating the product.
So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing 
stuff in general about the message not its subject.


yes, common use case, many sites give karma to comments / reviews and 
have links to them both in and out of context.


When the cost os just fixing Microdata syntax to make it easy to 
say things about the subject of a page.


far from expert on microdata, but @itemid may well cater for this.

a reply to many posts

[Nathan]

have been afc/ill for a while and after catching up today I've noticed 
there's been quite a bit going on over the last month, lots of nice 
meaty posts to the list, seems like a good chance to embrace some things 
and see what can be done moving forwards - so a few questions and comments:


schema.org / microdata:

RDFa is to RDF as Microdata is to []?

It seems conceivable that people may start using these common schemas 
from schema.org as data schema's behind the public interface in data 
stores - it would be nice to have a framework in there to save a few 
years of people repeating the same code and work.


If we extract the microdata from an html document what is the data 
model, how does one save it? how does one transfer it out of context as 
raw data?


OWL/RDFS is to RDF as [___] is to Microdata?

OWL/RDFS for microdata? how does one validate data, for example domain, 
range and enumerables?


microdata is rdf merged with rdfa cut down to size and given a classes 
and objects style found in many programming languages - this needs 
webized and abstracted out of html. Somewhat complimentary to Harry's 
comments, there's more to be gleaned from this than surface syntax and 
seo needs, to me at least the most interesting details are in how the 
schema's are constructed, many things to be noted and considered here - 
it's a common approach that most programmers will be familiar with - as 
above, and again, it needs webized.


microdata @itemref - doesn't this look like blank node in a surface syntax?

@itemid and @id will probably lead to confusion - if rdfa and microdata 
were both to leverage @id (in addition to html and javascript) then we'd 
have a low cost and high unification of approaches that would lend to 
the frag based many things described on one page approach that is ever 
so common. Consistency would be good in this department.


@itemprop has a clever algorithm, but will probably lead to unexpected 
functionality, it's inconsistent. eg:


  Science fiction
  itemprop="trailer">Trailer


lot's of wasted data, consider "Bob Smith" in the following:

  http://schema.org/Person";>
Bob Smith
  

and the use of alt, title - it's useful data that isn't utilized:

  
   
  

range-14:

the "ambiguous 'like'" and the "comments on a post" are two very good 
cases to be focused on, in the first case, the question of "what is 
being liked?" is very interesting, some sites have already taken a far 
more fine grained approach to this, if you look at sites like reddit 
with karma for both posts and comments you can see a clear need, and 
it's a good use case to focus on, further if one were to consider an 
http friendly read write api for those comments, then I'd argue it 
quickly becomes clear that each comment would potentially need two 
identifiers, a hash one for microdata and linking to the comment in 
context, and another one for CRUDing the comment and linking to it out 
of context - there must be an easy to create pattern between something 
like /post#comment-id and /comment/id .


the old arguments are well played out, and multiple approaches (see 
issue-57 document from JAR) are available - but the above two practical 
use cases will probably give the most long term benefit when addressed.


scruffyness and diversity:

David (Wood) recently mentioned "Neat vs Scruffy" which was a great 
point, and Kingsley has long since encouraged us to embrace the 
diversity of the web and look to translate from one format to another, 
and as Tim says, the web is an open platform that anybody can build on 
top of, thus we have an architecture that encourages diversity and 
innovation - it appears again to me that with schema.org and microdata 
we're being pointed in the direction people want to go, this raises many 
(potentially easy to address) questions, as I've listed above. Yes we 
can look to push RDF more, and convert microdata to rdf, try and get RDF 
and OWL up there to understand schema.org - no harm in that - but as 
I've mentioned before, some form of (simple) universal data could easily 
be designed on the back of this, and rdf, to offer something practical 
to the web masses that anybody can use, build on top of, and save lots 
of work around the globe.


Quite some time ago the RDFa/Microdata thing was noted, and it was clear 
then that the two needed merged before too much weight went behind 
microdata and legacy issues meant it was hard to change, that time is 
past now, I'm aware that some efforts may happen in this department, but 
really I'd be looking to see what lessons can be learned for RDF here, 
before the same thing happens there two, as there's been a huge 
investment in the sem web stack, and a large corporate trio could easily 
rip the ground from underneath this relatively small community, may not 
happen, but there's a risk of it, and it does appear that there's a 
strong long term message of "rdf is too complicated, we like to do 
things like this [x]", the same mess

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Alan Ruttenberg]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Renato Iannella 
wrote:

>
> On 17 Jun 2011, at 07:27, Patrick Logan wrote:
> > My primary other concerns have to do with (1) patent encumbrance and (2)
> the schema.org "use-wrap" license
>
> 
>
> The HTML 5 WG follows W3C RF Patent Policy - you can see a list of
> Disclosures here [1] (all from Apple).
>
> The schema.org terms [2] does state that it uses a CC License (which
> forbids patents), and then goes on to say *if* there were any patents, then
> they would make them Royalty-Free.
>

CC licenses say nothing with regards to patents, AFAIK.
-Alan


>
> 
>
> Also, given that 3 of the biggest companies produced a one-page legal
> document - that is an achievement ;-)
>
> Cheers...
> Renato Iannella
> Semantic Identity
> http://semanticidentity.com
> Mobile: +61 4 1313 2206
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/40318/status
> [2] http://schema.org/docs/terms.html
>
>
>

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Leif Warner]

You've lost me there - their own example they give on schema.org for RDFa is
less verbose than the microdata, and could be made even less so.
http://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html
What costs are you talking about being incurred?  Microdata just looks like
RDFa with a couple renames, explicit item scope, and support for prefixes
removed.
-Leif Warner

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:52 AM, Steve Harris wrote:

> I'm sure that some of these points were relevant at some level, but I
> suspect that's not the key reason.
>
> At some point, the team working on the internal project would have to go to
> the divisional CTO and/or CIO in charge of operations and ask permission to
> deploy the code on the production systems. They don't give a damn how
> interesting the technology is, just want to know how much it's going to cost
> in bps of bandwidth, bytes of storage, and microseconds of CPU per page. The
> answer for RDFa is probably an order of magnitude higher than the
> schema.org format, and could equate to tens of millions of dollars per
> year of extra cost, and will show little to no extra revenue (schema.orgv's 
> RDFa), even in the medium term. No chance.
>
> - Steve
>
> On 2011-06-17, at 01:02, Mischa Tuffield wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> *excuse a little top-posting before comments coming inline ...
>
> Great email Harry, I agree with your sentiment that schema.org shouldn't
> be perceived as a massive thread to the SW community. If anything I find and
> welcome the move, surely it will widen the audience of web-developers
> interested in creating and authoring structure data to the web? A lot of
> people write code, and work for companies who are heavily reliant on
> pleasing Search Engines - SEO is big business. Let users get on with
> building stuff with microdata/schema.org, and who knows they might even
> come round to using the various W3C SW specs when they find their needs
> change, when they find they want to interoperate with data whose primary
> focus isn't for human consumption or SEO.
>
> RDF satisfies more than one use-case, it is more than a SEO tool.
> Personally, I make daily use of RDF, http, SPARQL (to name a few) within the
> software platform we have built at Garlik (note that I have been too lazy to
> use other email address) and it makes sense to us as a business, as we make
> good use of developing software without being constrained by a database
> schema in a relational database and we can pull in data arbitrarily. In
> summary, RDF via  GoodRelations in RDFa has shown that the work has made an
> impact in the world of Search Engines, RDF/SPARQL is being used to power
> applications in a number of companies big and small, RDF is being outputted
> by major commercial sales houses, non-computer scientists are using it to
> represent their scientific data, governments are using in the shape of
> linked data/SPARQL, this is all good stuff ... more than one use-case -
> fundamentally engrained with the notion of interoperability and the
> standardised representation of data (awesome stuff!).
>
> I am not trying to have a dig here about microdata or schema.org, or the
> technology stack which builds on the aforementioned, I simply don't know
> enough about it to comment. I do know that the SW technology stack is
> growing strong though, and it is an open technology stack - being an
> optimist I feel that open stuff will prevail.
>
> http://example.com/Annotation"/>
> 
> *
> *
> On 16 Jun 2011, at 22:09, Harry Halpin wrote:
>
> I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
> bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
> First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
> engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
> argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
> Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
> straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
> use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
> provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
> a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.
>
>
> Indeed, I do feel that schema.org has been very explicit about how people
> with the given use-case can use their work to solve a real-world problem.
> Many people make work out of getting their employer some awesome search
> engine love. I went to a news related metadata talk (an rNews one -
> fantastic work by the way), and chatting to people from their industry I
> noticed how important it was to them. The use-case seemed to boil down to a
> standard way to annotate new stories/documents to please search engines to
> push eyeballs their way... this is great but I am convinced it is not the
> only contribution the SW tech stack has to give to the world. I recall
> someone had stats re: numbers of webpages vs numbers of rows in databases in
> the world...
>
>
> The reason people are upset are that they d

Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Henry Story]

On 17 Jun 2011, at 19:27, adasal wrote:

> That said the hacker is a various beast,

Indeed, hackers are not angels. But the people on this list should get back to 
hacking or work together with open source projects to get initial minimal 
working pieces embedded there. WebID is one; foaf is another, pingback, access 
control, ...
Get the really simple pieces working.

> and I wonder if this sort of thing can really be addressed without 
> overarching political/ethical/idealogical concerns. It's tough. 

It all fits together really nicely. I gave a talk on the philosophy of the 
Social Web if you are interested.
 http://www.slideshare.net/bblfish/philosophy-and-the-social-web-5583083

Hackers tend to be engineers with a political attitude, so they are more 
receptive to the bigger picture. But solving the big picture problem should 
have an easy entry cost if we want to get it going. 

I talked to the BBC but they have limited themselves to what they will do in 
the Social Web space as far as profile hosting goes. Again, I'd start small. 
Facebook started in universities not that long ago.

Henry


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 3:52 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:

On 6/17/11 3:44 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:

Hi,

On 17 June 2011 15:32, Kingsley Idehen  wrote:

On 6/17/11 3:11 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:

I just had to go and check whether Amazon reviews and Facebook
comments actually do have their own pages. That's because I've never
seen them presented as anything other than objects within another
container, either in a web page or a mobile app. So I think you could
argue that when people are "linking" and marking things as useful,
they're doing that on a more general abstraction, i.e. the "Work" (to
borrow FRBR terminology) not the particular web page.
You have to apply context to your statement above. Is the context: 
WWW as an

Information space or Data Space?

I can't answer that because I don't know what you mean by those terms.
It's just a web of resources as far as I'm concerned.

Cheers,

L.



Links that will help you with terminology.

1. http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/ -- Web as Global Data Space
2. http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/dec00/0608.html -- Web as 
Information Space (courtesy of quick Google search).




Leigh,

In addition to the above, and bearing in mind Harry's contribution to 
this conversation, here is one of his presentations in which slide #2 
makes reference to WWW as an Information Space [1].


Links:

1. http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/presentations/interface/

--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[adasal]

Hi Henry,
Hope you are good.

Yes there is the hacker community and that is the twist in the tail of the
story of the internet.
It may well be that certain projects will gather sufficient momentum to
address the balance (that I explain I see needs addressing, akin to pirate
radio + commercial broadcasting viz public broadcasting, if you like).
That said the hacker is a various beast, and I wonder if this sort of thing
can really be addressed without overarching political/ethical/idealogical
concerns. It's tough. Thinking about the BBC, they do have a charter and
that charter is framed with those considerations. I do not think that, and I
would expect others to argue about whether, the BBC is the absolute acme of
probity. But I think it a good starting point example.
It is also impossible to know what might catch on, certainly the domain of
the (open) knowledge web is broader than the social web. It leads on up to
machine machine interaction.
Oddly, though, while I can follow the example I gave of a use case for
semantic technologies that intersect with government, business and the
public I am stumped coming up with much in the social sphere. There must be
other ways of slicing and dicing that domain apart from facebook?

Adam

On 17 June 2011 16:30, Henry Story  wrote:

>
> On 17 Jun 2011, at 14:51, adasal wrote:
>
> Don't expect any support from that quarter. (Well apart from a few
> unhelpful scraps.)
>
> The question is how can the SemWeb academic community address these issues?
>
>
> There is the hacker community too, btw. The academic community is looking
> to be way ahead of the curve, and loves dealing with problems that are
> difficult to solve. The hacker communuity may be more interested in building
> things that work and are immediately useful - there is just no other way to
> grow the community of knowledgeable users.
>
> So I think it is the developer hacker community that one has to look at.
> And that means looking at the problem space and working out what solutions
> are viral - so that every hacker will want to participate - and also which
> can be implemented easily with current available tools by the largest
> community of developers.
>
> So for this you don't want to rely on the "big" players. They can't help
> that much, because they will tend to build things that work best for them:
> are centralised and don't work that well in a distributed space.
>
> You need something where each user benefits when every other user joins.
> And in my view that is the social web. The web started in exactly the same
> way: a few people built web pages that linked together. Each person that did
> found it valuable to convince others to join too. With structured linked
> data one can do the same thing, if one makes the data potent: ie it has to
> have an effect on people: by joining a group you get access to a party, a
> community of users, a discussion forum.
>
> In that space we have foaf you may say. But nobody really bothered making
> it potent. For example the viral part is missing: we only just wrote up a
> paper on how to make friending easy (viral)
> http://bblfish.net/tmp/2011/05/09/
>
> So what the linked data community needs is really to go back to basics and
> build really useful applications of linked data, where you get more and more
> people to join in by showing immediate benefits.
>
> Henry
>
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>

Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 4:51 PM, Henry Story wrote:


In short we need to all work together in the semweb as a team, using 
the tools we have built to do that. It's really not difficult to do. :-)



[1] video http://bblfish.net/blog/2011/05/25/

Yep!

+1000.

Working as a team has proven to be a little harder than one assumed a 
few years ago re. Linked Data bootstrap. Instead of collectively 
building the cake and realizing its magnitude, there's been a tendency 
to start scrapping of the poorly formed scraps :-(


When you truly comprehend the magnitude of the Linked Data opportunity, 
the very last thing you'll want to do is own it all yourself, it will 
kill you with indigestion, and that's if you're really lucky :-)


Instead of slapping the all problematic RDF label on Linked Data and 
perpetually inviting and inciting syntax wars, we should be orienting 
ourselves towards solutions that leverage the essence of Linked Data, 
without compromise. Again, we can embrace and extend/cleanup scruffiness 
since the net effect is to pour "opportunity costs" on the scruffy which 
ultimately forces them on board anyhow!




--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 4:30 PM, Henry Story wrote:
In that space we have foaf you may say. But nobody really bothered 
making it potent. For example the viral part is missing: we only just 
wrote up a paper on how to make friending easy (viral) 
http://bblfish.net/tmp/2011/05/09/


So what the linked data community needs is really to go back to basics 
and build really useful applications of linked data, where you get 
more and more people to join in by showing immediate benefits.


As I recall, WebID is a practical application of Linked Data (which 
encompasses FOAF in this context) that's inherently viral :-)


--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Schema.org considered helpful or harmful?

[adasal]

Yes, it's an utter nonsense.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with semantics, semweb. It is just a fancy
catalogue, remarkably similar to what is being developed at Yell (Yellow
pages) to mediate directory listings, especially for mobile clients.
It is a way for the big three to cut into the directory listing business by
having companies self serve (certainly further undermining the Yell business
model).
I should point something out in this regard.
Yell having millions (internationally many millions) of listings on their
books whereas the big three do not. This is a commercially significant fact.
What we have before us is a commercial war. Every time someone shouts for
schema.org they are lending credence to the big three in this battle.
- Although this is not why I am down on it, I think I make my reasons plain
elsewhere.

In short, it is basically nothing else than a commercial battle between
commercial organisations that people are unwittingly being suckered into.

Adam

On 17 June 2011 17:45, AzamatAbdoullaev  wrote:

> On Friday, June 17, 2011 12:09 AM, Harry wrote:
> "According to the argument of decentralized extensibility, 
> schema.org*exactly* what Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. 
> It's a
> straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can use
> structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and provides
> examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let a thousand
> ontologies bloom with no central control.
> AA: This reminds me a political rhetoric. "Letting a hundred flowers
> blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting
> progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in
> our land."
> As there is a political center and peripheries, central government and
> local government, there is a core ontology and multiple ontologies.
> HH: Schema.org is not a threat. It's an opportunity to step up. Good luck
> everyone!
> AA: In real, its a threat, to intelligence and ontology, as well as to the
> committed and dedicated, bringing their good to the field, from Ontolog
> Forum and SW Forum.
> I am leaving aside the value of rdf or rdfa, or any other SW schemas. Let's
> just look at the definition and organization of the key notion, schema,
> promoted by the "fantastic triple": "The schemas are a set of 'types', each
> associated with a set of properties. The types are arranged in a hierarchy".
> Why types, and not kinds, forms, sorts, classes, or categories. Why each
> type is associated with a set of properties, instead of being marked by a
> common distinct characteristics or quality. Is it related to the notion of
> abstract data types and abstraction in computing. Or, is it comes from the
> type theory dealing with type systems and hierarchy of types. Hardly...
> Here is a simple but clear WordNet's definition: "schema is an internal
> representation of the world; an organization of concepts and actions to be
> revised by new information about the world."
> Make a note, schemas are about the world. Now look at the "taxonomy": the
> most generic type is Thing. Its closest children are:
>  a.. CreativeWork
>  b.. Event
>  c.. Intangible
>  d.. Organization
>  e.. Person
>  f.. Place
>  g.. Product
> Frankly, i met and read a plenty of taxonomies, classifications,
> categorizations, typologies, sortings, arrangement and groupings. Even
> following that "thousand ontologies movement", they made a real dog's
> breakfast of their job. Just look how Intangible is divided: Enumeration,
> Language, Offer, Quantity, Rating Structured Value.
> The entire "type hierarchy" strikes me as being created with no sense, no
> logic, no system, no method, no any hint of ontology. If its "step up", then
> i don't know what might be step down :)
> Azamat Abdoullaev
> http://www.eis.com.cy
>
> - Original Message - From: "Harry Halpin" 
> To: "Linked Data community" ; "Semantic Web" <
> semantic-...@w3.org>
> Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 12:09 AM
> Subject: Schema.org considered helpful
>
>
>  I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
>> bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
>> First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
>> engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
>> argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
>> Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
>> straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
>> use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
>> provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
>> a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.
>>
>> The reason people are upset are that they didn't use RDFa, but instead
>> used microdata. One *cannot* argue that Google is ignoring open
>> standards. RDFa and microdata are *both* Last Call W3C Working Drafts
>> now. RDFa 1.0 is a

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Alan Ruttenberg]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Pat Hayes  wrote:

>
> On Jun 17, 2011, at 6:35 AM, Dave Reynolds wrote:
>
> >
> > [As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
> > restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]
>
> Or about the weather in Oacala, for example.
>
> Pat
>

And is the weather part of the essence of the resource?

-Alan

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[adasal]

So the internet is a country. In this country some may conform while others
may break the rules - of this country and/or of the country from you or they
have come. it's fun to break rules - we can listen to decent music for a
start.
We can also put it about that we are the bad asses. How cool is that!
Suddenly we are all bad ass geeks ... but hold on a minute.

Actually, this country has a hidden cost of entry. Not least is that it
masquerades conformity with non-conformity, and there is little more
conformist than the internet, little more stringently conformist than what
is expected of those who hold the technical skills.
And, dare I say, little more suspect than the propaganda of no rules no
consequences in a domain entirely dominated by commercial interests playing
entirely to commercial rules.

The BBC and local radio may have been tedious and pirate radio disruptive,
but, in this country (the UK I mean) there is a balance that has been (and
continues to be) fought for.
There is no such balance in the internet. Schema.org certainly is not the
disruptive innovation that will address this. It is not a disruptive
innovation full stop.

Adam

On 17 June 2011 15:53, Phil Archer  wrote:

> An interesting and thought provoking post, Harry, and close to my own in
> many respects.
>
> Strangely it reminded me of one of my previous lives. In 1983 I was working
> for a radio station in Stoke on Trent (north English midlands). It was a
> traditional local radio station with a duty to serve a diverse community
> with classical, country and speech programmes in amongst the usual pop
> stuff.
>
> And what did we, the staff, listen to? Laser 558 [1]. We set up extra-large
> a.m. antennae just so we could hear this crazy station broadcasting in true
> pirate style from a ship in the North Sea.
>
> Relevance?
>
> Laser 558 was brash, loud, broke all the rules, stuck to its mantra of
> "never more than a minute away from music" and technically, well, let's say
> it didn't meet Broadcasting Authority rules (or anyone else's).
>
> And we loved it.
>
> And /every/ British music station bent over backwards to copy it.
>
> Sadly they all ballsed it up so music radio here is worse than it's ever
> been, but the point was that Laser 558 was a game changer that shook up an
> industry, for the most part, for the better.
>
> Dunno if the analogy is a perfect fit, but it feels to me as if schema.orgis 
> a game changer that, in one way or another, we're going to get used to
> having around.
>
> Phil.
>
> [1] 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Laser_558
>
>
>
> On 16/06/2011 22:09, Harry Halpin wrote:
>
>> I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
>> bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
>> First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
>> engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
>> argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
>> Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
>> straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
>> use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
>> provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
>> a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.
>>
>> The reason people are upset are that they didn't use RDFa, but instead
>> used microdata. One *cannot* argue that Google is ignoring open
>> standards. RDFa and microdata are *both* Last Call W3C Working Drafts
>> now. RDFa 1.0 is a spec but only for XHTML 1.0, which is not what most
>> of the Web uses. Microdata does have RDF parsing bugs, but again, most
>> developers outside the Semantic Web probably don't care - they want
>> JSON anyways.
>>
>> Form what I understand from tevents  where Rich Snippets team has
>> presented is that RDFa is simply too complicated for ordinary web
>> developers to use. Google has been deploying Rich Snippets for two
>> years, claim to have user-studies  and have experience with a large
>> user-base. This user-driven feedback should be taken on board by both
>> relevant WGs obviously, HTML and RDFa. Designing technology without
>> user-feedback leads to odd results (for proof, see many of the fun and
>> exiciting "httpRange-14" discussions). Which is also why many
>> practical developers do not use the technology.
>>
>> But realistically, it's not the RDFa WG's job to do user-studies and
>> build compelling user-experiences in products. They are only a few
>> people. Why has the *hundreds* of people in the Semantic Web community
>> not done such work?
>>
>> The fact of the matter is that the Semantic Web academic community has
>> had their priorities skewed to the wrong direction. Had folks been
>> spending time doing usability testing and focussing on user-feedback
>> on common problems (such as the rather obvious "vocabulary hosting"
>> problem) rather than focussing on things wi

Re: Schema.org considered helpful or harmful?

[AzamatAbdoullaev]

On Friday, June 17, 2011 12:09 AM, Harry wrote:
"According to the argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org 
*exactly* what Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a 
straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can use 
structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and provides 
examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let a thousand 
ontologies bloom with no central control.
AA: This reminds me a political rhetoric. "Letting a hundred flowers blossom 
and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting 
progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in 
our land."
As there is a political center and peripheries, central government and local 
government, there is a core ontology and multiple ontologies.
HH: Schema.org is not a threat. It's an opportunity to step up. Good luck 
everyone!
AA: In real, its a threat, to intelligence and ontology, as well as to the 
committed and dedicated, bringing their good to the field, from Ontolog 
Forum and SW Forum.
I am leaving aside the value of rdf or rdfa, or any other SW schemas. Let's 
just look at the definition and organization of the key notion, schema, 
promoted by the "fantastic triple": "The schemas are a set of 'types', each 
associated with a set of properties. The types are arranged in a hierarchy". 
Why types, and not kinds, forms, sorts, classes, or categories. Why each 
type is associated with a set of properties, instead of being marked by a 
common distinct characteristics or quality. Is it related to the notion of 
abstract data types and abstraction in computing. Or, is it comes from the 
type theory dealing with type systems and hierarchy of types. Hardly...
Here is a simple but clear WordNet's definition: "schema is an internal 
representation of the world; an organization of concepts and actions to be 
revised by new information about the world."
Make a note, schemas are about the world. Now look at the "taxonomy": the 
most generic type is Thing. Its closest children are:

 a.. CreativeWork
 b.. Event
 c.. Intangible
 d.. Organization
 e.. Person
 f.. Place
 g.. Product
Frankly, i met and read a plenty of taxonomies, classifications, 
categorizations, typologies, sortings, arrangement and groupings. Even 
following that "thousand ontologies movement", they made a real dog's 
breakfast of their job. Just look how Intangible is divided: Enumeration, 
Language, Offer, Quantity, Rating Structured Value.
The entire "type hierarchy" strikes me as being created with no sense, no 
logic, no system, no method, no any hint of ontology. If its "step up", then 
i don't know what might be step down :)

Azamat Abdoullaev
http://www.eis.com.cy

- Original Message - 
From: "Harry Halpin" 
To: "Linked Data community" ; "Semantic Web" 


Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 12:09 AM
Subject: Schema.org considered helpful



I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.

The reason people are upset are that they didn't use RDFa, but instead
used microdata. One *cannot* argue that Google is ignoring open
standards. RDFa and microdata are *both* Last Call W3C Working Drafts
now. RDFa 1.0 is a spec but only for XHTML 1.0, which is not what most
of the Web uses. Microdata does have RDF parsing bugs, but again, most
developers outside the Semantic Web probably don't care - they want
JSON anyways.

Form what I understand from tevents  where Rich Snippets team has
presented is that RDFa is simply too complicated for ordinary web
developers to use. Google has been deploying Rich Snippets for two
years, claim to have user-studies  and have experience with a large
user-base. This user-driven feedback should be taken on board by both
relevant WGs obviously, HTML and RDFa. Designing technology without
user-feedback leads to odd results (for proof, see many of the fun and
exiciting "httpRange-14" discussions). Which is also why many
practical developers do not use the technology.

But realistically, it's not the RDFa WG's job to do user-studies and
build compelling user-experiences in products. They are only a few
people. Why has the *hundreds* of people in the Semantic Web community
not done such work?

The fact of the matter is that the Semantic Web academic community has
had their priorities skewed to the wrong direction. Had folks been
spending time doing u

Help needed: *brief* online poll about blank-nodes

[Hogan, Aidan]

Dear colleagues,

We're conducting some research into the current use of blank-nodes in
Linked Data publishing, and we need your help.

We would like to get a general impression of the intent of publishers
when using blank-nodes in their RDF data. Along these lines, we drafted
a short survey containing *2 questions* which will only take a minute or
two of your time. 

We would be very grateful if you would take the time to fill out the
poll. We will make the results available online later this month.

**Note that the poll is trying to determine what you *intend* when you
publish blank-nodes. It is not a quiz on RDF Semantics. There is no
"correct" answer.**

Link to Poll: http://db.ing.puc.cl/amallea/blank-nodes-poll

If you have been involved in publishing RDF data on the Web (e.g., as
Linked Data), please provide a URL or a domain name which indicates the
dataset.

Many thanks for your time!
Alejandro and Aidan


P.S. Please feel free to tweet a link to this mail. However, to avoid
influencing responses, we would strongly prefer if this email is not
replied to on-list. If you want to leave feedback, please do so in the
space provided in the poll, or reply directly to Alejandro (CC'ed on
this mail) and Aidan. Thanks!

P.P.S. We've had some problems sending mails on the list (due to
moderation lag), so we apologise in advance if repetitions of this mail
surface later.

CfP: ACM CIKM 2011 International Workshop on Search and Mining User-generated Contents (SMUC 2011)

[Iván Cantador]

[Apologies if you receive this more than once]


Final call for Papers

3rd International Workshop on Search and Mining User-generated Contents
(SMUC 2011)
28th October 2011 | Glasgow, UK 
http://ir.ii.uam.es/smuc2011/

Held in conjunction with the
20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011) 
http://www.cikm2011.org/ 

 

+++
Important dates
+++

* Paper submission: 24 June 2011
* Notification of acceptance:   29 July 2011
* Camera-ready: 19 August 2011
* SMUC 2011 workshop:   28 October 2011

++
Motivation
++

Nowadays, the huge amount and variety of user generated contents available
in the Web open a wide range of opportunities to enhance information
retrieval and e-commerce applications. Opinions and reviews about products,
annotations and bookmarks on multimedia resources, and friend relations in
social networks are just a few examples of personal information sources to
be exploited in order to both improve the user's experience and increase the
companies' revenues in online search and commerce activities.

As in its previous editions, SMUC 2011 aims at becoming a major
international forum for researchers and practitioners from several
information and knowledge management areas, such as text/data mining,
information extraction, and information retrieval/filtering, which focus
their work on user-generated contents in Social Media.

For SMUC workshop, we identify four main research themes into which the
above research problems can be categorized: Searching in Social Media,
Mining Social Media, Opinion Mining & Sentiment Analysis, and Multimedia
Processing and Retrieval. For all of them, we are interested in developing
and testing intelligent systems and applications, involving innovative
research from the fields of user modeling, personalization, recommendation,
information visualization, and business intelligence, to name a few.
Different research lines, backgrounds, perspectives and degrees of expertise
will be present at the workshop, and thus very interesting multidisciplinary
discussions, collaborations and work synergies between the workshop
attendees are expected as one of the main outcomes of the event.

++
Topics of interest
++

SMUC workshop represents a multidisciplinary forum for researchers and
practitioners that work on knowledge extraction, management and exploitation
in Social Media, and belong to different, but complementary fields such as
Web (content/structure/usage) mining, information retrieval, opinion mining
and sentiment analysis, user modeling, personalization and recommendation,
and multimedia processing and retrieval.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Searching in Social Media

- Social search and ranking algorithms
- Multi-entity search
- Multifaceted search
- Distributed and high performance algorithms: scalability and
efficiency

* Mining Social Media

- Knowledge discovery in Social Media
- Social network analysis/mining, community detection and evolution
- Collaborative tagging analysis/mining
- Topic detection, and trend discovery
- Influence, trust, and privacy analysis
- Spamming, phishing, and vandalism detection
- Cross-lingual and cross-domain text mining

* Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

- Opinion extraction, classification, summarization, and
visualization
- Irony detection
- Plagiarism detection of duplicate or near-duplicate opinions
- Temporal sentiment analysis
- Cross-lingual and cross-domain sentiment analysis
- Blog analysis, and micro-blog mining
- Product review analysis

* Multimedia processing and retrieval in Social Media

- Multimedia information extraction and retrieval in Social Media
- Multimodal retrieval
- Audio, music and video (clip) processing and analysis
- Context-based multimedia retrieval
- Detection of cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, cyber-pedophilia

* Intelligent systems & applications in Social Media

- User modeling, personalization, and recommender systems
- Market analysis, and Business Intelligence applications (direct
marketing, branding, etc.)


Organizing Committee


* Iván Cantador, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
* Francisco M. Carrero, BrainSINS & Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
* José C. Cortizo, BrainSINS & Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
* Paolo Rosso, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
* Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
* José A. Troyano, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain 

+++
Contact informati

Re: Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Henry Story]

On 17 Jun 2011, at 17:36, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:

> Wave! I'm very much in the hacker community too. Get cool stuff done on hack 
> days and so forth.
> 
> My current hack:
> screen scraping the glastonbury festival site to get their entire programme;
> http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/glastonbury/2011/
> 
> And then
> http://programme.ecs.soton.ac.uk/glastonbury/2011/sparql
> 
> And then
> http://g2011.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Very nice UI and cool hack too. Showing and explaining how to quickly put 
together cool apps like this is one good meme that can catch on - and so become 
viral.

But the next thing to do is technical virality, where the software itself 
creates an incentive to link into the data web. For example by allowing people 
to comment on the page above (with experience of the band) after authenticating 
using WebID [1]. This gives people an incentive to have a webid, and so to have 
a foaf, and so to maintain data themselves (using a neat UI of course). As more 
of those people tie themselves in, there is more reason to build cool apps, 
which can become even cooler because they are then social without being 
centralised. 

In short we need to all work together in the semweb as a team, using the tools 
we have built to do that. It's really not difficult to do. :-)


[1] video http://bblfish.net/blog/2011/05/25/

> 
> 
> 
> Henry Story wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 17 Jun 2011, at 14:51, adasal wrote:
>> 
>>> Don't expect any support from that quarter. (Well apart from a few 
>>> unhelpful scraps.)
>>> 
>>> The question is how can the SemWeb academic community address these issues?
>> 
>> There is the hacker community too, btw. The academic community is looking to 
>> be way ahead of the curve, and loves dealing with problems that are 
>> difficult to solve. The hacker communuity may be more interested in building 
>> things that work and are immediately useful - there is just no other way to 
>> grow the community of knowledgeable users.
>> 
>> So I think it is the developer hacker community that one has to look at. And 
>> that means looking at the problem space and working out what solutions are 
>> viral - so that every hacker will want to participate - and also which can 
>> be implemented easily with current available tools by the largest community 
>> of developers.
>> 
>> So for this you don't want to rely on the "big" players. They can't help 
>> that much, because they will tend to build things that work best for them: 
>> are centralised and don't work that well in a distributed space.
>> 
>> You need something where each user benefits when every other user joins. And 
>> in my view that is the social web. The web started in exactly the same way: 
>> a few people built web pages that linked together. Each person that did 
>> found it valuable to convince others to join too. With structured linked 
>> data one can do the same thing, if one makes the data potent: ie it has to 
>> have an effect on people: by joining a group you get access to a party, a 
>> community of users, a discussion forum.
>> 
>> In that space we have foaf you may say. But nobody really bothered making it 
>> potent. For example the viral part is missing: we only just wrote up a paper 
>> on how to make friending easy (viral) http://bblfish.net/tmp/2011/05/09/
>> 
>> So what the linked data community needs is really to go back to basics and 
>> build really useful applications of linked data, where you get more and more 
>> people to join in by showing immediate benefits. 
>> 
>> Henry
>> 
>> 
>> Social Web Architect
>> http://bblfish.net/
>> 
> 
> -- 
> 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/

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Hackers - Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Henry Story]

On 17 Jun 2011, at 14:51, adasal wrote:

> Don't expect any support from that quarter. (Well apart from a few unhelpful 
> scraps.)
> 
> The question is how can the SemWeb academic community address these issues?

There is the hacker community too, btw. The academic community is looking to be 
way ahead of the curve, and loves dealing with problems that are difficult to 
solve. The hacker communuity may be more interested in building things that 
work and are immediately useful - there is just no other way to grow the 
community of knowledgeable users.

So I think it is the developer hacker community that one has to look at. And 
that means looking at the problem space and working out what solutions are 
viral - so that every hacker will want to participate - and also which can be 
implemented easily with current available tools by the largest community of 
developers.

So for this you don't want to rely on the "big" players. They can't help that 
much, because they will tend to build things that work best for them: are 
centralised and don't work that well in a distributed space.

You need something where each user benefits when every other user joins. And in 
my view that is the social web. The web started in exactly the same way: a few 
people built web pages that linked together. Each person that did found it 
valuable to convince others to join too. With structured linked data one can do 
the same thing, if one makes the data potent: ie it has to have an effect on 
people: by joining a group you get access to a party, a community of users, a 
discussion forum.

In that space we have foaf you may say. But nobody really bothered making it 
potent. For example the viral part is missing: we only just wrote up a paper on 
how to make friending easy (viral) http://bblfish.net/tmp/2011/05/09/

So what the linked data community needs is really to go back to basics and 
build really useful applications of linked data, where you get more and more 
people to join in by showing immediate benefits. 

Henry


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Pat Hayes]

On Jun 17, 2011, at 6:35 AM, Dave Reynolds wrote:

> 
> [As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
> restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]

Or about the weather in Oacala, for example.

Pat

> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
> 


IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973   
40 South Alcaniz St.   (850)202 4416   office
Pensacola(850)202 4440   fax
FL 32502  (850)291 0667   mobile
phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us   http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes

Job: Data Engineer, Kasabi

[Leigh Dodds]

Hi,

Short job advert: we're looking for someone to join the Kasabi team as
a Data Engineer. The role will involve working with RDF and Linked
Data so should be of interest to this community!

More information at [1]. Feel free to get in touch with me personally
if you want more information.

Cheers,

L.

[1] http://tbe.taleo.net/NA9/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=TALIS&cws=1&rid=41

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
Mobile: 07850 928381
http://kasabi.com
http://talis.com

Talis Systems Ltd
43 Temple Row
Birmingham
B2 5LS

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 3:53 PM, Phil Archer wrote:


Dunno if the analogy is a perfect fit, but it feels to me as if 
schema.org is a game changer that, in one way or another, we're going 
to get used to having around. 


It's a game changer because its given the entire Linked Data and 
Semantic Web aspirations a major boost. Decouple flaws associated with 
one syntax rules them all and you'll see that structured data is a 
critical beachhead for InterWeb scale Linked Data. Once you have Linked 
Data all over the Web the foundation is in place for smart agents (that 
really put OWL to use) via a Web of Semantically Linked Data. We get 
there one step at a time, ever structured data contribution should be 
celebrated, especially when it comes from industry behemoths.


A Syntax war is an utter waste of time.

--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Phil Archer]

An interesting and thought provoking post, Harry, and close to my own in 
many respects.


Strangely it reminded me of one of my previous lives. In 1983 I was 
working for a radio station in Stoke on Trent (north English midlands). 
It was a traditional local radio station with a duty to serve a diverse 
community with classical, country and speech programmes in amongst the 
usual pop stuff.


And what did we, the staff, listen to? Laser 558 [1]. We set up 
extra-large a.m. antennae just so we could hear this crazy station 
broadcasting in true pirate style from a ship in the North Sea.


Relevance?

Laser 558 was brash, loud, broke all the rules, stuck to its mantra of 
"never more than a minute away from music" and technically, well, let's 
say it didn't meet Broadcasting Authority rules (or anyone else's).


And we loved it.

And /every/ British music station bent over backwards to copy it.

Sadly they all ballsed it up so music radio here is worse than it's ever 
been, but the point was that Laser 558 was a game changer that shook up 
an industry, for the most part, for the better.


Dunno if the analogy is a perfect fit, but it feels to me as if 
schema.org is a game changer that, in one way or another, we're going to 
get used to having around.


Phil.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_558


On 16/06/2011 22:09, Harry Halpin wrote:

I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.

The reason people are upset are that they didn't use RDFa, but instead
used microdata. One *cannot* argue that Google is ignoring open
standards. RDFa and microdata are *both* Last Call W3C Working Drafts
now. RDFa 1.0 is a spec but only for XHTML 1.0, which is not what most
of the Web uses. Microdata does have RDF parsing bugs, but again, most
developers outside the Semantic Web probably don't care - they want
JSON anyways.

Form what I understand from tevents  where Rich Snippets team has
presented is that RDFa is simply too complicated for ordinary web
developers to use. Google has been deploying Rich Snippets for two
years, claim to have user-studies  and have experience with a large
user-base. This user-driven feedback should be taken on board by both
relevant WGs obviously, HTML and RDFa. Designing technology without
user-feedback leads to odd results (for proof, see many of the fun and
exiciting "httpRange-14" discussions). Which is also why many
practical developers do not use the technology.

But realistically, it's not the RDFa WG's job to do user-studies and
build compelling user-experiences in products. They are only a few
people. Why has the *hundreds* of people in the Semantic Web community
not done such work?

The fact of the matter is that the Semantic Web academic community has
had their priorities skewed to the wrong direction. Had folks been
spending time doing usability testing and focussing on user-feedback
on common problems (such as the rather obvious "vocabulary hosting"
problem) rather than focussing on things with little to no support
with the world outside academia, then we probably would not be in the
situation we are in today. Today, major companies such as Microsoft
(oData) and Google (microdata) are jumping on the "open data"
bandwagon but finding the RDF stack unacceptable. Some of it may be a
"not invented here" syndrome, but as anyone who has actually looked at
RDF/XML can tell you, some of it is hard-to-deny technical reasoning
by companies that have decided that "open data" is a great market but
do not agree with the technical choices made by the  Semantic Web
stack.

This is not to say good things can't come out of the academic
community - the *internet* came out of the academic community. But
seriously, at some point (think of the role of Netscape in getting the
Web going with the magic of images) commercial companies enter the
game. We should be happy now search engines are seeing value in
structured data on the Web.

I would suggest the Semantic Web community take on-board the
"microdata" challenge in two different ways. First of all, start
focussing on user-studies and user experience (not just visual
interfaces, the Semantic Web has more than its share of user-hostile
visual interfaces). It's harder to publish academic papers on these
topics but possible (see SIGCHI), and would help a lot with actual
deployment. Second, we should start focussing more on actual empirical
data-dri

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 3:44 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:

Hi,

On 17 June 2011 15:32, Kingsley Idehen  wrote:

On 6/17/11 3:11 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:

I just had to go and check whether Amazon reviews and Facebook
comments actually do have their own pages. That's because I've never
seen them presented as anything other than objects within another
container, either in a web page or a mobile app. So I think you could
argue that when people are "linking" and marking things as useful,
they're doing that on a more general abstraction, i.e. the "Work" (to
borrow FRBR terminology) not the particular web page.

You have to apply context to your statement above. Is the context: WWW as an
Information space or Data Space?

I can't answer that because I don't know what you mean by those terms.
It's just a web of resources as far as I'm concerned.

Cheers,

L.



Links that will help you with terminology.

1. http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/ -- Web as Global Data Space
2. http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/dec00/0608.html -- Web as 
Information Space (courtesy of quick Google search).



--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 3:36 PM, David Wood wrote:

Hi all,

This thread seems to me to be classic "neat vs. scruffy" argument [1].  I used 
to be a neat, when I was young, foolish and of course selfish.  Now that I am old enough 
to see others' points of view, I have become scruffy.  Either that, or I'm just tired of 
trying to force others to do things my way.

The Web is a scruffy place and that is a feature, not a bug.


May I say: it accommodates scruffiness because of its architecture :-)

 Kingsley

Regards,
Dave

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies


On Jun 17, 2011, at 10:27, Kingsley Idehen wrote:


On 6/17/11 2:55 PM, Ian Davis wrote:

BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the

  blog, not the movie it is about.

  AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
  saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.

  And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
  like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
  rating the product.
  So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
  stuff in general about the message not its subject.

As an additional point, a review_is_  a seperate thing, it's not a web
page. It is often contained within a webpage. It seems you are
conflating the two here. Reviews and comments can be and often are
syndicated across multiple sites so clearly any "liking" of the review
needs to flow with it.

Yes, it is a separate thing representable as a Data Object. Now the obvious 
question: what is a Web Page? Isn't that a sourced from Data at an Address 
that's streamed to a client that uses a specific data presentation metaphor as 
basis for user comprehension?

Are the following identical or different, re. URI functionality ?

1. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data
2. http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data
3. http://dbpedia.org/data/Linked_Data.json .

I may want to bookmark: http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data, I may also be 
interested in its evolution over time via services lime memento [1] .

The thing is that re. WWW we have an Information Space dimension and associated 
patterns that's preceded the Data Space dimension and emerging patterns that we 
(this community) are collectively trying to crystallize, in an unobtrusive 
manner.

Links:

1. http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/

--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&   CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen












--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Leigh Dodds]

Hi,

On 17 June 2011 15:32, Kingsley Idehen  wrote:
> On 6/17/11 3:11 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
>>
>> I just had to go and check whether Amazon reviews and Facebook
>> comments actually do have their own pages. That's because I've never
>> seen them presented as anything other than objects within another
>> container, either in a web page or a mobile app. So I think you could
>> argue that when people are "linking" and marking things as useful,
>> they're doing that on a more general abstraction, i.e. the "Work" (to
>> borrow FRBR terminology) not the particular web page.
>
> You have to apply context to your statement above. Is the context: WWW as an
> Information space or Data Space?

I can't answer that because I don't know what you mean by those terms.
It's just a web of resources as far as I'm concerned.

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
Mobile: 07850 928381
http://kasabi.com
http://talis.com

Talis Systems Ltd
43 Temple Row
Birmingham
B2 5LS

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 3:27 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:


Yes, it is a separate thing representable as a Data Object. Now the 
obvious question: what is a Web Page? Isn't that a sourced from Data 
at an Address that's streamed to a client that uses a specific data 
presentation metaphor as basis for user comprehension?


Are the following identical or different, re. URI functionality ?

1. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data
2. http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data
3. http://dbpedia.org/data/Linked_Data.json .

I may want to bookmark: http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data, I may 
also be interested in its evolution over time via services lime 
memento [1] .


The thing is that re. WWW we have an Information Space dimension and 
associated patterns that's preceded the Data Space dimension and 
emerging patterns that we (this community) are collectively trying to 
crystallize, in an unobtrusive manner.


Links:

1. http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/ 


Meant to say:

**
Yes, it is a separate thing representable as a Data Object. Now the 
obvious question: what is a Web Page? Isn't that Data streamed from an 
Address (provided by a server) to a client that uses a specific data 
presentation metaphor as basis for user comprehension?

***


Are the following identical or different, re. URI functionality ?

1. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data
2. http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data
3. http://dbpedia.org/data/Linked_Data.json .

I may want to bookmark: http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data, I may also 
be interested in its evolution over time via services lime memento [1] .


The thing is that re. WWW we have an Information Space dimension and 
associated patterns that's preceded the Data Space dimension and 
emerging patterns that we (this community) are collectively trying to 
crystallize, in an unobtrusive manner.


Links:

1. http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/


--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[David Wood]

Hi all,

This thread seems to me to be classic "neat vs. scruffy" argument [1].  I used 
to be a neat, when I was young, foolish and of course selfish.  Now that I am 
old enough to see others' points of view, I have become scruffy.  Either that, 
or I'm just tired of trying to force others to do things my way.

The Web is a scruffy place and that is a feature, not a bug.

Regards,
Dave

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies


On Jun 17, 2011, at 10:27, Kingsley Idehen wrote:

> On 6/17/11 2:55 PM, Ian Davis wrote:
>>> BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like 
>>> the
>>> >  blog, not the movie it is about.
>>> >
>>> >  AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
>>> >  saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.
>>> >
>>> >  And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
>>> >  like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
>>> >  rating the product.
>>> >  So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
>>> >  stuff in general about the message not its subject.
>> As an additional point, a review_is_  a seperate thing, it's not a web
>> page. It is often contained within a webpage. It seems you are
>> conflating the two here. Reviews and comments can be and often are
>> syndicated across multiple sites so clearly any "liking" of the review
>> needs to flow with it.
> 
> Yes, it is a separate thing representable as a Data Object. Now the obvious 
> question: what is a Web Page? Isn't that a sourced from Data at an Address 
> that's streamed to a client that uses a specific data presentation metaphor 
> as basis for user comprehension?
> 
> Are the following identical or different, re. URI functionality ?
> 
> 1. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data
> 2. http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data
> 3. http://dbpedia.org/data/Linked_Data.json .
> 
> I may want to bookmark: http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data, I may also be 
> interested in its evolution over time via services lime memento [1] .
> 
> The thing is that re. WWW we have an Information Space dimension and 
> associated patterns that's preceded the Data Space dimension and emerging 
> patterns that we (this community) are collectively trying to crystallize, in 
> an unobtrusive manner.
> 
> Links:
> 
> 1. http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/
> 
> -- 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kingsley Idehen   
> President&  CEO
> OpenLink Software
> Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
> Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
> Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Ian Davis]

Small typo changed the meaning of what I was saying:

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Ian Davis  wrote:
> OK, we differ here then. I would prefer to bookmark the movie because
> that's what I'm interested in. The page will change over the years but
> the movie will still persist. Today you have no choice because your
> conceptual model does not give a URI to the movie and doesn't see the
> need to generate 2 URIs.

But I meant to write:

Today you have no choice because your conceptual model does not give a
URI to the movie and [the publisher] doesn't see the need to generate
2 URIs.

Of course I recognise your conceptual model sees the need for multiple
URIs... :)

Ian

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 3:11 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:

I just had to go and check whether Amazon reviews and Facebook
comments actually do have their own pages. That's because I've never
seen them presented as anything other than objects within another
container, either in a web page or a mobile app. So I think you could
argue that when people are "linking" and marking things as useful,
they're doing that on a more general abstraction, i.e. the "Work" (to
borrow FRBR terminology) not the particular web page.


You have to apply context to your statement above. Is the context: WWW 
as an Information space or Data Space? These contexts can co-exist, but 
we need to allow users context-switch, unobtrusively. Thus,  they have 
to co-exist, and that's why we have to leverage what the full URI 
abstraction delivers. As stated earlier, it doesn't mean others will 
follow or understand immediately, you need more than architecture for 
that;  hence the need for a broad spectrum of solutions that do things 
properly.


--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 2:55 PM, Ian Davis wrote:

BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the
>  blog, not the movie it is about.
>
>  AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
>  saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.
>
>  And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
>  like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
>  rating the product.
>  So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
>  stuff in general about the message not its subject.

As an additional point, a review_is_  a seperate thing, it's not a web
page. It is often contained within a webpage. It seems you are
conflating the two here. Reviews and comments can be and often are
syndicated across multiple sites so clearly any "liking" of the review
needs to flow with it.


Yes, it is a separate thing representable as a Data Object. Now the 
obvious question: what is a Web Page? Isn't that a sourced from Data at 
an Address that's streamed to a client that uses a specific data 
presentation metaphor as basis for user comprehension?


Are the following identical or different, re. URI functionality ?

1. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data
2. http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data
3. http://dbpedia.org/data/Linked_Data.json .

I may want to bookmark: http://dbpedia.org/page/Linked_Data, I may also 
be interested in its evolution over time via services lime memento [1] .


The thing is that re. WWW we have an Information Space dimension and 
associated patterns that's preceded the Data Space dimension and 
emerging patterns that we (this community) are collectively trying to 
crystallize, in an unobtrusive manner.


Links:

1. http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/

--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Bob Ferris]

Hi,

On 6/17/2011 4:11 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:

Hi,

On 17 June 2011 14:04, Tim Berners-Lee  wrote:


On 2011-06 -17, at 08:51, Ian Davis wrote:

...

Quite. When a facebook user clicks the "Like" button on an IMDB page
they are expressing an opinion about the movie, not the page.


BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the
blog, not the movie it is about.

AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.

And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
rating the product.
So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
stuff in general about the message not its subject.


Well even that's debatable.

I just had to go and check whether Amazon reviews and Facebook
comments actually do have their own pages. That's because I've never
seen them presented as anything other than objects within another
container, either in a web page or a mobile app. So I think you could
argue that when people are "linking" and marking things as useful,
they're doing that on a more general abstraction, i.e. the "Work" (to
borrow FRBR terminology) not the particular web page.


Well, that is obviously the level where the (abstract) information 
resource is located (can be located), or? ;)


Cheers,


Bob


PS: cf., e.g., 
http://odontomachus.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/frbr-and-the-web/ ;)

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 2:18 PM, Ian Davis wrote:

I am really not sure that I want to give up the ability in my browser
>  to bookmark a page about something -- the IMDB page a
>  about a movie, rather than the movie itself.
>

OK, we differ here then. I would prefer to bookmark the movie because
that's what I'm interested in.


Yes, and you have that right as an individual using the Web. Same 
applies to those that want to bookmark a Page about the Movie. Thus, the 
eternal challenge remains: how does a system inherently cater for 
natural variations inherent in individuals. This is where AWWW scores 
big time re. Web as a Global Space for Information and Data :-)



  The page will change over the years but
the movie will still persist.


Yes, and I may be interested in understanding the evolution of the page 
over the years. The Page is as valid a Data Object as its Subject 
Matter. This is the crux of the matter. The system has to handle our 
individuality, as per earlier comment.



Today you have no choice because your
conceptual model does not give a URI to the movie and doesn't see the
need to generate 2 URIs.


Today, we don't have the options in question because a majority of Web 
users are still only utilizing its Information Space dimension.








--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Leigh Dodds]

Hi,

On 17 June 2011 14:04, Tim Berners-Lee  wrote:
>
> On 2011-06 -17, at 08:51, Ian Davis wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> Quite. When a facebook user clicks the "Like" button on an IMDB page
>> they are expressing an opinion about the movie, not the page.
>
> BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the
> blog, not the movie it is about.
>
> AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
> saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.
>
> And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
> like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
> rating the product.
> So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
> stuff in general about the message not its subject.

Well even that's debatable.

I just had to go and check whether Amazon reviews and Facebook
comments actually do have their own pages. That's because I've never
seen them presented as anything other than objects within another
container, either in a web page or a mobile app. So I think you could
argue that when people are "linking" and marking things as useful,
they're doing that on a more general abstraction, i.e. the "Work" (to
borrow FRBR terminology) not the particular web page.

And that's presumably the way that Facebook and Amazon see it too
because that data is associated with the status or review in whichever
medium I look at it (page or app).

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
Mobile: 07850 928381
http://kasabi.com
http://talis.com

Talis Systems Ltd
43 Temple Row
Birmingham
B2 5LS

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Ian Davis]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Tim Berners-Lee  wrote:
>>> Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
>>> http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
>>> returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
>>> still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
>>> don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.
>>>
>>> [As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
>>> restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]
>>>
>>
>> Quite. When a facebook user clicks the "Like" button on an IMDB page
>> they are expressing an opinion about the movie, not the page.
>
> BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the
> blog, not the movie it is about.
>
> AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
> saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.
>
> And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
> like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
> rating the product.
> So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
> stuff in general about the message not its subject.

As an additional point, a review _is_ a seperate thing, it's not a web
page. It is often contained within a webpage. It seems you are
conflating the two here. Reviews and comments can be and often are
syndicated across multiple sites so clearly any "liking" of the review
needs to flow with it.

Ian

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Henry Story]

On 17 Jun 2011, at 15:04, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
> saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.

Indeed I have had a few people on Facebook comment that they were very unhappy 
not being able to distinguish between what the object of a "like" is. Such as 
when one "likes" a page about the death of a friend, or about some child 
tortured in some distant county.

Of course FB was right to start with such a simple relation. Just as the web 
started with the .. link. One starts with the simplest relations 
that make no clear distinction between what is liked and then following the 
pressure from the community, and business opportunities, one adds distinctions 
in the order of which is the most profitable to add next. I am sure Facebook is 
very greatful to academia for having shown that it will find it no trouble to 
move to liking objects and  being able to distinguish those from web pages. But 
their job is to build tools that generate huge markets in order to build 
profit, so they will only increase the subtlety of their distinctions as their 
business cases require them.

We can build ontologies that follow a similar path, starting from ontologies 
that don't require someone to distinguish between pages and things named by 
them. It will be interesting to work out how far one can go with that and at 
what point it breaks down conceptually. So with the "like" button, it does not 
allow one to distinguish the liking of an article or the death of a friend. But 
the procedural value of "like" - easy notification system - was big enough to 
build out a huge market - within the conceptual limitations of the relation.

In any case it does not seem that this has anything to do with architectural 
limitations of the Web, since it is easy I think even in RDF to do both.


Henry

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Ian Davis]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Tim Berners-Lee  wrote:
>
> On 2011-06 -17, at 08:51, Ian Davis wrote:
>
 If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then
 you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
 express my review in RDF,  using the page's URI as the identifier.
>>>
>>> Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
>>> http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
>>> returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
>>> still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
>>> don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.
>>>
>>> [As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
>>> restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]
>>>
>>
>> Quite. When a facebook user clicks the "Like" button on an IMDB page
>> they are expressing an opinion about the movie, not the page.
>
> BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the
> blog, not the movie it is about.
>
> AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
> saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.
>
> And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to
> like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
> rating the product.
> So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing
> stuff in general about the message not its subject.

Sure. All these use cases stand and can co-exist. I can look at the
data in any of those responses, or data I glean from elsewhere, to
figure out if the URI I'm accessing refers to the content I received
or the subject of that content. That model works for any protocol BTW.

>
> I am really not sure that I want to give up the ability in my browser
> to bookmark a page about something -- the IMDB page a
> about a movie, rather than the movie itself.
>

OK, we differ here then. I would prefer to bookmark the movie because
that's what I'm interested in. The page will change over the years but
the movie will still persist. Today you have no choice because your
conceptual model does not give a URI to the movie and doesn't see the
need to generate 2 URIs.


> When the cost os just fixing Microdata syntax to make it easy to
> say things about the subject of a page.

i don't think this has anything to do with microdata.

Ian

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Tim Berners-Lee]

On 2011-06 -17, at 08:51, Ian Davis wrote:

>>> If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then
>>> you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
>>> express my review in RDF,  using the page's URI as the identifier.
>> 
>> Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
>> http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
>> returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
>> still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
>> don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.
>> 
>> [As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
>> restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]
>> 
> 
> Quite. When a facebook user clicks the "Like" button on an IMDB page
> they are expressing an opinion about the movie, not the page.

BUT when the click a "Like" button on a blog they are expressing they like the
blog, not the movie it is about.

AND when they click "like" on a facebook comment they are
saying they like the comment not the thing it is commenting on.

And on Amazon people say "I found this review useful" to 
like the review on the product being reviewed, separately from
rating the product.
So there is a lot of use out there which involves people expressing 
stuff in general about the message not its subject.

I am really not sure that I want to give up the ability in my browser
to bookmark a page about something -- the IMDB page a
about a movie, rather than the movie itself.

When the cost os just fixing Microdata syntax to make it easy to 
say things about the subject of a page.

Tim

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Ian Davis]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Dave Reynolds
 wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 21:22 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>
>> On 2011-06 -16, at 16:41, Ian Davis wrote:
>
>> > The problem here is that there are so few things that people want to
>> > say about web pages compared with the multitude of things they want to
>> > say about every other type of thing in existence.
>>
>> Well, that is a wonderful new thing.  For a long while it was difficult to
>> put data on the web, while there is quite a lot of metadata.
>> Wonderful idea that the semantic web may be beating the document
>> web hands down but that's not totally clear that we should trash the
>> use of URIs for use to refer to documents as do in the document web.
>
> I'm sure Ian wasn't claiming the data web is "beating" the document web
> and equally sure that you don't really think he was :)

Yes, absolutely.

>
> FWIW my experience is also that most of the data that people want to
> publish *in RDF* is about things rather than web pages. Clearly there
> *are* good use cases for capturing web page metadata in RDF but I've not
> seen that many in-the-wild cases where people wanted to publish data
> about *both* the web page and the thing.
>
> That's why Ian's "Back to Basics" suggestion works for me [as a fall
> back from "just use #"]. My interpretation is that, unlike most of this
> thread, it wasn't saying "use URIs ambiguously" but saying "the
> interpretation of the URI is up to the publisher and is discovered from
> the data not from the protocol response, it is legitimate to use a
> http-no-# URI to denote a thing if that is what you really want to do".
>

Yes, that's exactly what I am saying.


> Thus if I want to publish a table of e.g. population statistics at
> http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population then I can do so and use that
> URI within the RDF data as denoting the data set. As publisher I'm
> saying "this is a qb:DataSet not a web page, anything that looks like a
> web page when you point a browser at it is just a rendering related to
> that data and that rendering isn't being given a separate URI so you can
> talk about it, sorry about that".
>
>> If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then
>> you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
>> express my review in RDF,  using the page's URI as the identifier.
>
> Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
> http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
> returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
> still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
> don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.
>
> [As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
> restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]
>

Quite. When a facebook user clicks the "Like" button on an IMDB page
they are expressing an opinion about the movie, not the page.

Ian

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[adasal]

Lin,
A couple of things.
Your quote says 'the Semantic Web academic community...' but you just
mention 'the SemWeb community...', so somehow I assume that for you the one
is synonymous with the other.
When you say 'are pushing potentially interested people away from joining
the effort' which effort is this (activity or group of activities in which
people might take part) and towards what goal or set of goals?
I think this seems very different if we are thinking about academic or
largely academic funded projects compared to potential commercial projects.
For instance, from my very limited experience in academia, I understand that
one goal is to publish original work which, of course, goes into the
knowledge pool. How something is judged original is another issue, obviously
it is not a straight forward issue. One trajectory that has to be considered
is existing expertise in the academic group.
This can usefully be contrasted with the story I tell in my earlier post.
There is no call for originality in that scenario, far from it. Propitious
circumstances and originality in the market for viable business use cases
are not necessarily related. I would say it is only by some happy and rare
chance that they are (and, true, businesses have been founded on them).
You say 'Paola di Malo has often brought up the need for the SemWeb
community to look to the methods of the software engineering discipline,
with it's greater focus on empirical analysis of how developers use tools.'
Yes, well a tool is a tool. This cannot answer the bigger issues.
Think about this:-
example 1.
Deri is in a position to make the case for what I discuss in my earlier post
to (any relevant) government. For all I know they have, but assuming not,
why might that be. Only an organisation of some stature has a chance making
an approach to government - hence Deri as a candidate. As I say, assuming
not, it would have something to do with the way they (Deri) define their
business. We are again in the realm of the (un)propitious.
example 2.
It is possible to make the web 'more intelligent' but, remember, this
probably (almost definitely) contradicts the big three's business model.
Don't expect any support from that quarter. (Well apart from a few unhelpful
scraps.)

The question is how can the SemWeb academic community address these issues?

Best,

Adam

On 17 June 2011 12:37, Lin Clark  wrote:

>
>>>
>>> That's interesting. Was there anybody who pointed this out at the time?
>>
>>
> Or maybe this was sarcastic... if so, sorry for the misunderstanding :)
>

SWIB11 deadline extended to June 30th (Semantic Web in Libraries)

[Neubert Joachim]

Due to several requests the submission deadline to the third 
conference "Semantic Web in Libraries" (SWIB), 28.-30.11.2011 
in Hamburg has been extended to June, 30th 2011.

Here, once again, the call for proposals:

After the success of the "Semantic Web in Libraries" (SWIB) events in
2009 and 2010, the SWIB11 will take place in Hamburg from 28 to 30
November 2011. The conference will again be organised by the North
Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz), Cologne, and the
German National Library of Economics - Leibniz Information Centre for
Economics (ZBW), Kiel and Hamburg.

A rising number of actors in librarianship and its related fields are
experimenting with Semantic Web technologies and Linked Open Data
(LOD). The LOD cloud as a whole grew by 300% in 2010, whereas the
amount of data relevant for libraries grew by nearly 1000%. The W3C
has created a "Linked Library Data" group to observe this development,
whose first report is due to be published in August. The "Semantic Web
Special Interest Group" established by IFLA shows that this topic has
shown up on their radar as well. At the same time, the principles and
workflows of traditional scientific communication and publication are
under scrutiny with a view to a consistently web-based data and
service infrastructure comprising the entire research and publication
process. Concepts like "nano-publications", "Semantic Publishing",
"Open Data", "Enhanced Publications" or "Research Objects" mark the
re-orientation of academic work, away from monolithic, comparatively
unflexible and barely interlinked reference points towards a
distributed, comparatively granular data infrastructure which is
continuously accessible to researchers and into which their
contributions recognizably return.

These are the questions and topics which we would like to discuss with
you at the conference:

* How do I find my way around the LOD cloud and how do I achieve
  maximum visibility for my assets?
* How do we produce useful links to and between newly published
  datasets?
* Where do we find best practice examples for LOD-based applications
  which show the added value created by linking assets, in particular
  domain-overlapping assets?
* What are the trends in scholarly communication? What are the
  consequences of the transformation of traditional research and
  publication processes for libraries and what are the opportunities
  Linked Open Data can offer here?
* Library Authority Files and their potential as LOD for library
  applications or research information systems
* What could or should a future Linked Open Data infrastructure look
  like? Are there trends to adapt library applications or research
  environments to the Semantic Web and to support their users in RDF
  publishing?
* Open licences as a prerequisite for LOD-based infrastructures
* What kind of support is to be expected from W3C, international and
  national bodies for future development?

These are our topics for SWIB11. Do you have an interesting project or
research topic that should be presented at the conference? We would
like to receive suggestions and proposals for contributions (with a
brief abstract, no more than one page) until 20 June 2011. The
conference will be held in German, but contributions in English are
welcome. Please send them electronically to:

Joachim Neubert
ZBW
Tel. +49-(0)40-42834462
E-mail: j.neubert(at)zbw.eu

or

Adrian Pohl
hbz
Tel. +49-(0)221-40075235
E-mail: swib(at)hbz-nrw.de

Website: http://swib.org/swib11
Twitter: #swib11

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Renato Iannella]

On 17 Jun 2011, at 21:13, Lin Clark wrote:

> >That's interesting. Was there anybody who pointed this out at the time?
> 
> Yes. Most notably, Ian Hickson pointed it out in direct relation to RDFa and 
> Microdata
> http://www.mail-archive.com/whatwg@lists.whatwg.org/msg11067.html
> http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Change_Proposal_for_ISSUE-120
And others (including me ;-) have pointed out the need for the SW to rethink 
its current approach (in 2008/9):

  http://renato.iannella.it/blog/files/sw-harmful.html
  http://renato.iannella.it/blog/files/swml.html

And a call for a simpler RDF (by Sandro Hawke):

  http://decentralyze.com/2010/11/10/simplified-rdf/

And comments from JeniT about being "too insular and may be deaf to wider 
developer concerns":

  http://www.w3.org/2010/11/TPAC/RDF-SW-velocity.pdf

Please note, I fully support the SW, and want to see it succeed beyond all our 
expectations.
I am hoping that schema.org.gate will drive a new change...

Cheers...

Renato Iannella
Semantic Identity
http://semanticidentity.com
Mobile: +61 4 1313 2206

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 12:35 PM, Dave Reynolds wrote:

>  If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then
>  you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
>  express my review in RDF,  using the page's URI as the identifier.

Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population  web page because the RDF
returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.


Let's look at this from a slight different angle. What does HTTP 200 OK 
mean? I believe it's how a server indicates to a client that an Address 
(it created) is functional .



I believe Tim is saying: HTTP 200 OK is integral to the Web in a general 
sense. This is behavior backed into AWWW that underlies the ubiquitous 
WWW albeit the information space dimension re., Linked Documents. An 
HTML resource is still a resource, and 200 OK doesn't care about the 
resource type.


As I stated in an earlier post, handling indirection on the server (this 
is basically what we did in our very first Linked Data server 
implementation, pre. Banff 2007) puts a burden on the clients i.e., it 
really sets an expectation that the client is willing and capable of 
doing Name and Address disambiguation by analyzing the data returned. 
Now, if an application commits 100% to self-describing data expressed in 
graph form, serialized in a variety of representations, that would work, 
but in reality this is actually worse than what we are grappling with 
right now re. paths of least resistance en route to broadening and 
accelerating Linked Data uptake. Thus, like all things, its at best just 
another option with some consequences that could ultimately compromise 
the big picture goal.



--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle [was Re: Schema.org in RDF ...]

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 1:46 AM, David Booth wrote:

I agree with TimBL that it is*good*  to distinguish between web pages
and dogs -- and we should encourage folks to do so -- because doing so
*does*  help applications that need this distinction.  But the failure to
make this distinction does*not*  break the web architecture any more
than a failure to distinguish between male dogs and female dogs.


Instead of *break* what about compromising or undermining flexibility 
implicit in AWWW? This is tantamount to obscuring the WWW potential 
relative to its broad user constituency.


Re. schema.org, I don't regard their effort as breaking, compromising, 
or undermining AWWW. I simply believe they are taking baby steps that 
are 100% defined by their current business models. Rightly or wrongly 
so, they have to protect their business models. In a sense, the same 
applies to academia and its model where grant funding is vital to 
research projects.


What is dangerous though, is encouraging people to misuse and 
misunderstand AWWW. Names and Addresses are distinct items. AWWW essence 
depends on preserving this vital distinction.


When there are more applications (+1 to Henry's comment about focusing 
on Linked Data apps and viral patterns) this lower level matter will 
vapourize.


Although not present (I am too young) I am certain similar arguments 
arose during the early days of silicon based computing between OS 
developers and programming language developers. I certainly know these 
conversations did arise when Spreadsheets vendors tackled Cell Reference 
functionality.


There are many useful cases in plain sight that many overlook re. power 
of URIs as data conductors, integrators, and access mechanisms. I think 
(based on my experience with this community and industry at large) that 
there is too much focus on reinventing too many parts of the consumption 
stack, from scratch. The key is to be "useful" but introduce 
"usefulness" unobtrusively if you really seek uptake. Naturally, this 
requires understanding of what already exists (i.e., domain and subject 
matter knowledge) and functionality areas addressed by existing 
solutions. Sorry, but if all you do is program, you cannot really 
understand the reality of end-users.


I like to make reference to Apple as a great anecdote because they've 
risen from near demise to the vanguard of modern computing by exploiting 
the InterWeb from the inside out, they don't see the Web as simply being 
about HTML. They understand that its a linked information space and 
future data space. They utilize this insight internally in a manner that 
just manifests as being "useful" to its ever growing customer base.


Remember, there's a lot of old NeXTStep still underlying what Apple 
does. Also remember, the WWW was built on an NeXT machine with a lot of 
inspiration from how its innards worked. Believe it or not, we are still 
playing catch up (circa. 20011)  with NeXTStep and Unix in general re. 
really smart and useful Linked Data apps :-)


Embrace history and the future gets clearer and much more exciting. We 
have an unbelievable opportunity within grasp. We can embrace and extend 
(in a good way) what we may perceive as imperfections by others (e.g. 
schema.org). As Pat stated in an earlier post, these imperfections 
present opportunities that might even span decades before the behemoths 
out there hit their respective opportunity cost thresholds. Once said 
thresholds are hit they will respond accordingly via product fixes 
and/or enterprise acquisitions etc..


Contrary to popular belief, I will state once again that HTTP 303 is the 
poster child for ingenuity inherent in the HTTP protocol and the AWWW.  
Yes, we could also up the semantic smarts on clients and let a retrieved 
resource disambiguate Names and Addresses, but that only adds a burden 
to a target audience that's already challenged re:


1. recognizing linked data structures via directed graphs
2. recognizing that linked data structures have always been about links 
and that HTTP URIs are a powerful vehicle for expanding this concept to 
InterWeb scales
3. recognizing that de-reference (indirection) and address-of operations 
are achievable via URIs and cost-effectively so via HTTP URIs due to WWW 
ubiquity
4. understanding that RDF is *an option* for linked data structures at 
InterWeb scales, you can use other syntaxes without losing access to 
really useful stuff like RDFS and OWL semantics (which also suffers from 
over emphasis on RDF at expense of core syntax agnostic concepts).



Links:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#Cells
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#Named_cells .

--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Semantic Web Challenge 2011 CfP and Billion Triple Challenge 2011 Data Set published.

[Chris Bizer]

Hi Giovanni,

 

yes, it’s great that you and your team have provided the Sindice crawl as a
dump for TREC2011.

 

Now, the community has two large-scale datasets for experimentation. 

 

Your dataset that covers various types of structured data on the Web (RDFa,
WebAPIs, microformats …)  as well as the new Billion Triple Dataset that
focuses on data that is published according to the Linked Data principles. 

 

Our dataset is relatively current (May/June 2011) and we also still provide
the 2010 and 2009 versions of the dataset for download so that people can
analyze the evolution of the Web of Linked Data.

 

Your dataset covers the whole time span (2009-2011). Does the dataset
contain any meta-information about how old specific parts of the dataset are
so that people can also analyze the evolution? 

 

Let’s hope that Google, Yahoo or Micosoft will soon start providing an API
over the Schema.org data that they extract from webpages (or even provide
this data as a dump).

 

Then, the community would have three real-world datasets as a basis for
future research J

 

Cheers,

 

Chris

 

 

 

Von: g.tummare...@gmail.com [mailto:g.tummare...@gmail.com] Im Auftrag von
Giovanni Tummarello
Gesendet: Freitag, 17. Juni 2011 13:35
An: Chris Bizer
Cc: Semantic Web; public-lod; semantic...@yahoogroups.com
Betreff: Re: Semantic Web Challenge 2011 CfP and Billion Triple Challenge
2011 Data Set published.

 

 

This year, the Billion Triple Challenge data set consists of 2 billion
triples. The dataset was crawled during May/June 2011 using a random sample
of URIs from the BTC 2010 dataset as seed URIs. Lots of thanks to Andreas
Harth for all his effort put into crawling the web to compile this dataset,
and to the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie which provided the necessary
hardware for this labour-intensive task.

 

 

 

On a related note, 

 

 while nothing can beat a custom job obviously,

 

i feel like reminding that those that don't have said mighty
time/money/resources that any amount of data that one wants  rom the
repositories in Sindice which we do make freely available for things like
this. (0 to 20++ billion triples, LOD or non LOD, microformats, RDFa, custom
filtered etc)

 

See the  TREC 2011 competition
http://data.sindice.com/trec2011/download.html (1TB+ of data!)  or the
recent W3C data anaysis which is leading to a new reccomendation
(http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/profile/data/)  etc.

 

trying to help. 

Congrats on the great job guys of course for the Semantic web challenge
which is a long standing great initiative!

Gio

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Lin Clark]

>
>
>>
>> That's interesting. Was there anybody who pointed this out at the time?
>
>
Or maybe this was sarcastic... if so, sorry for the misunderstanding :)

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

[Dave Reynolds]

On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 21:22 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> On 2011-06 -16, at 16:41, Ian Davis wrote:

> > The problem here is that there are so few things that people want to
> > say about web pages compared with the multitude of things they want to
> > say about every other type of thing in existence.
> 
> Well, that is a wonderful new thing.  For a long while it was difficult to
> put data on the web, while there is quite a lot of metadata.
> Wonderful idea that the semantic web may be beating the document
> web hands down but that's not totally clear that we should trash the
> use of URIs for use to refer to documents as do in the document web.

I'm sure Ian wasn't claiming the data web is "beating" the document web
and equally sure that you don't really think he was :)

FWIW my experience is also that most of the data that people want to
publish *in RDF* is about things rather than web pages. Clearly there
*are* good use cases for capturing web page metadata in RDF but I've not
seen that many in-the-wild cases where people wanted to publish data
about *both* the web page and the thing.

That's why Ian's "Back to Basics" suggestion works for me [as a fall
back from "just use #"]. My interpretation is that, unlike most of this
thread, it wasn't saying "use URIs ambiguously" but saying "the
interpretation of the URI is up to the publisher and is discovered from
the data not from the protocol response, it is legitimate to use a
http-no-# URI to denote a thing if that is what you really want to do".

Thus if I want to publish a table of e.g. population statistics at
http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population then I can do so and use that
URI within the RDF data as denoting the data set. As publisher I'm
saying "this is a qb:DataSet not a web page, anything that looks like a
web page when you point a browser at it is just a rendering related to
that data and that rendering isn't being given a separate URI so you can
talk about it, sorry about that".

> If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then 
> you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
> express my review in RDF,  using the page's URI as the identifier.

Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.

[As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]

Dave

Re: Semantic Web Challenge 2011 CfP and Billion Triple Challenge 2011 Data Set published.

[Giovanni Tummarello]

> This year, the Billion Triple Challenge data set consists of 2 billion
> triples. The dataset was crawled during May/June 2011 using a random sample
> of URIs from the BTC 2010 dataset as seed URIs. Lots of thanks to Andreas
> Harth for all his effort put into crawling the web to compile this dataset,
> and to the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie which provided the necessary
> hardware for this labour-intensive task.
>
> **
>


On a related note,

 while nothing can beat a custom job obviously,

i feel like reminding that those that don't have said mighty
time/money/resources that any amount of data that one wants  rom the
repositories in Sindice which we do make freely available for things like
this. (0 to 20++ billion triples, LOD or non LOD, microformats, RDFa, custom
filtered etc)

See the  TREC 2011 competition
http://data.sindice.com/trec2011/download.html (1TB+ of data!)  or the
recent W3C data anaysis which is leading to a new reccomendation (
http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/profile/data/)  etc.

trying to help.
Congrats on the great job guys of course for the Semantic web challenge
which is a long standing great initiative!
Gio

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Kingsley Idehen]

On 6/17/11 12:13 PM, Lin Clark wrote:


I don't want to start a fight on this list, there are already enough 
of those going on and I have a feeling those are pushing potentially 
interested people away from joining the effort. I just wanted to note 
that yes, it has been pointed out.


We cannot take issue with vigorous debate on a public forum like this. I 
truly believe that vigorous debate ultimately enlightens all 
participants. Of course, the debates should be civil :-)


The statement above is in direct reference to the "potentially pushing 
interested people away.." comment above.


--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Lin Clark]

>
> >The fact of the matter is that the Semantic Web academic community has
> >had their priorities skewed to the wrong direction. Had folks been
> >spending time doing usability testing and focussing on user-feedback
> >on common problems (such as the rather obvious "vocabulary hosting"
> >problem) rather than focussing on things with little to no support
> >with the world outside academia, then we probably would not be in the
> >situation we are in today.
>
> That's interesting. Was there anybody who pointed this out at the time?


Yes. Most notably, Ian Hickson pointed it out in direct relation to RDFa and
Microdata

   - http://www.mail-archive.com/whatwg@lists.whatwg.org/msg11067.html
   - http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Change_Proposal_for_ISSUE-120

Paola di Malo has often brought up the need for the SemWeb community to look
to the methods of the software engineering discipline, with it's greater
focus on empirical analysis of how developers use tools. I know that these
discussions have come up on
lists
and
in discussions at conferences like ISWC because I have been a part of those
discussions. So I don't think the community can say it hasn't been informed.

Moreover, I don't think a scientific community should need to be told to be
empirical and use the scientific method. That should be the default. As I
said on the semantic-web list last year:

"If assertions about human use are part of the argument, then
empirical research
about how humans use the tools should be a part of the research and evaluation.
We need to build a scientific literature that actually addresses these
issues instead of assuming that human mind is the best of all possible
(logical)
worlds."

I don't want to start a fight on this list, there are already enough of
those going on and I have a feeling those are pushing potentially interested
people away from joining the effort. I just wanted to note that yes, it has
been pointed out.

-Lin

--
Lin Clark
DERI, NUI Galway 

lin-clark.com
twitter.com/linclark

Semantic Web Challenge 2011 CfP and Billion Triple Challenge 2011 Data Set published.

[Chris Bizer]

Hi all,

 

we are happy to announce that the Billion Triples Challenge 2011 Data Set
has been published yesterday. 

 

We thus circulate the Call for Participation for the 9th Semantic Web
Challenge 2011 again. 

 

This year, the Billion Triple Challenge data set consists of 2 billion
triples. The dataset was crawled during May/June 2011 using a random sample
of URIs from the BTC 2010 dataset as seed URIs. Lots of thanks to Andreas
Harth for all his effort put into crawling the web to compile this dataset,
and to the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie which provided the necessary
hardware for this labour-intensive task.

 

The Semantic Web Challenge 2011 will take place at the 10th International
Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany on October 23-27. We are looking
forward to receive your submissions until September 30, 2011, 23:59 CET.

 

More information about the Semantic Web Challenge 2011 as well as about the
former challenges is found at

 

  http://challenge.semanticweb.org/

 

Best,

 

Diane and Chris

 

 

Call for Participation for the 9th Semantic Web Challenge 

Open Track and Billion Triples Track 

at the 10th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2011 
Bonn, Germany 
October 23-27, 2011 
  http://challenge.semanticweb.org/ 

Introduction

Submissions are now invited for the 9th annual Semantic Web Challenge, the
premier event for demonstrating practical progress towards achieving the
vision of the Semantic Web. The central idea of the Semantic Web is to
extend the current human-readable Web by encoding some of the semantics of
resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door
to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will
be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of
these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner. 

As the core technological building blocks are now in place, the next
challenge is to demonstrate the benefits of semantic technologies by
developing integrated, easy to use applications that can provide new levels
of Web functionality for end users on the Web or within enterprise settings.
Applications submitted should give evidence of clear practical value that
goes above and beyond what is possible with conventional web technologies
alone. 

As in previous years, the Semantic Web Challenge 2011 will consist of two
tracks: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. The key difference
between the two tracks is that the Billion Triples Track requires the
participants to make use of the data set that has been crawled from the Web
and is provided by the organizers. The Open Track has no such restrictions.
As before, the Challenge is open to everyone from industry and academia. The
authors of the best applications will be awarded prizes and featured
prominently at special sessions during the conference. 

The overall goal of this event is to advance our understanding of how
Semantic Web technologies can be exploited to produce useful applications
for the Web. Semantic Web applications should integrate, combine, and deduce
information from various sources to assist users in performing specific
tasks. 

Challenge Criteria

The Challenge is defined in terms of minimum requirements and additional
desirable features that submissions should exhibit. The minimum requirements
and the additional desirable features are listed below per track. 

Open Track

Minimal requirements

1.  The application has to be an end-user application, i.e. an
application that provides a practical value to general Web users or, if this
is not the case, at least to domain experts. 
2.  The information sources used 

*   should be under diverse ownership or control 
*   should be heterogeneous (syntactically, structurally, and
semantically), and 
*   should contain substantial quantities of real world data (i.e. not
toy examples). 

3.  The meaning of data has to play a central role. 

*   Meaning must be represented using Semantic Web technologies. 
*   Data must be manipulated/processed in interesting ways to derive
useful information and 
*   this semantic information processing has to play a central role in
achieving things that alternative technologies cannot do as well, or at all;


Additional Desirable Features 

In addition to the above minimum requirements, we note other desirable
features that will be used as criteria to evaluate submissions. 

*   The application provides an attractive and functional Web interface
(for human users) 
*   The application should be scalable (in terms of the amount of data
used and in terms of distributed components working together). Ideally, the
application should use all data that is currently published on the Semantic
Web. 
*   Rigorous evaluations have taken place that demonstrate the benefits
of semantic technologies, or validate the results obtaine

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[adasal]

I noticed Steve's comment in this very civilised discussion without seeing
his details, and was going to confirm how much this reminds me of the way
CTO's and architect groups think.
Steve mentions an 'internal project', but I think there is a degree of
confusion about the nature of the domain we are discussing.
I think there is
1. Search engines
2. LOD
3. Enhanced HTML that may expose data such as to become (semantic) LOD
4. Internal - using semantics
5. Internal that consumes/produces LOD (i.e. a bigger internal application
than implied by 2. or 3.)

2. and 3. are considered more or less in the absence of any business use
case.
But to be realistic we should be looking at 1. and 5. as business.
To understand 1. we have to sketch in likely business benefits to those
businesses - our suppliers. A notable point about 1. is those businesses
produce extra data out of the data our usage gives them, which, potentially,
could be very interesting and most certainly is not LOD. A further point is
that the manner in which they find and serve the results is up to them, and
we, as users, must evaluate what we are consuming. For instance, relevant to
semantics, search results are very fragmented and fairly arbitrary compared
to an hypothetical rational query response along the axis of knowledge. Such
a hypothetical query is entirely different in kind to serving links to web
pages (that is web pages owned by people or organisations who may want to be
searchable).
In terms of LOD or open semantic usage that is two 'marks' against search
engines: the first generating data that only they are in a position to do
which we have a natural interest in (and could, theoretically, be generated
by a neutral party), the second that the results ever will not be really
semantically viable. But we want them to be in the business they are in,
that of reliably returning links to pages, don't we? Promotion of a semantic
vision and supplying a semantic search engine is essentially different to
that business.
5. above is different again. This comes back to the CTO point just made by
Steve. It is very difficult to make a business case for such a project.
I tried to do so when in Serco in relation to their BusinessLink contract
with HMRC. My approach we incomplete but here are some of things I would
have had to consider.
(HMRC and Serco were acting on the Varney report to create a single web
presence for the government's business oriented concerns with business and
the citizen.)
My (and my colleagues') idea was, roughly, to semantically enhance the core
engine to make it into a 'semantic switch board' that would direct traffic
and exchange data according to semantic criteria, either out or onto queues.
Bear with me or skip to final point below if you prefer -:)
Some Benefits
1. Greatly simplify the site design
2. Prevent user evaporation as they are passed to another site
3. Solve single sign on issues
4. Control and balance traffic to different disparate services
5. Build more targeted, intelligible and accessible services from the solid
foundation of a semantic core
6. Possibility of creating framework that third party suppliers could plug
their services into, further automating government business transactions
...
Some Concerns
 costs
1. Queues would have to be picked up by third party internal suppliers at
the other end - there would be appreciable cost in this
2. Some third parties had implemented their own queues, in their own format,
so multiple formats to support - who would bear the cost here
3. Reworking of core engine - expensive to do properly, and nothing short of
this would work here
 benefits?
4. Is government in the business of facilitating business over and above
necessary transactions with business?
5. How to demonstrate that cost per transaction is reduced significantly

This final point is obviously the deal breaker. Short of being able to
demonstrate this there could be no buy in.
How could this be demonstrated?
I don't think this is a sort of chicken and egg, were there other similar
schemes benefits could be extrapolated.
I think this is more an aligning of the planets. It is quite possible that
in five or so years this will be undertaken. The existing infrastructure
cannot last for ever, and will begin to look unwieldy soon enough. My
thoughts are a consortia (or just concerted pressure + ideas) of small
suppliers who might themselves benefit from having a slice of this as part
of their portfolio.

>From this it can be seen how difficult a propitious alignment is. It could
never come about!
Steve's point remains: there has to be a business case.

(BTW there was a back story about the funding for this that got us into the
position of making this proposal in the first place which I wont go into
here.)

Best,

Adam

On 17 June 2011 08:52, Steve Harris  wrote:

> I'm sure that some of these points were relevant at some level, but I
> suspect that's not the key reason.
>
> At some point, the team working on the inte

Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle [was Re: Schema.org in RDF ...]

[Christopher Gutteridge]

On 17/06/11 01:46, David Booth wrote:

I agree with TimBL that it is *good* to distinguish between web pages
and dogs -- and we should encourage folks to do so -- because doing so
*does* help applications that need this distinction.  But the failure to
make this distinction does *not* break the web architecture any more
than a failure to distinguish between male dogs and female dogs.
We've been encouraging people to do so. Most do not have the time to 
invest in complexity that they percieve no benefit from adding.


We need to reward people for good semantics by making sure there's tools 
and apps which add value for their business and activities.


--
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

/ Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
/ Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, 
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
/ Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/

Re: Schema.org considered helpful

[Steve Harris]

I'm sure that some of these points were relevant at some level, but I suspect 
that's not the key reason.

At some point, the team working on the internal project would have to go to the 
divisional CTO and/or CIO in charge of operations and ask permission to deploy 
the code on the production systems. They don't give a damn how interesting the 
technology is, just want to know how much it's going to cost in bps of 
bandwidth, bytes of storage, and microseconds of CPU per page. The answer for 
RDFa is probably an order of magnitude higher than the schema.org format, and 
could equate to tens of millions of dollars per year of extra cost, and will 
show little to no extra revenue (schema.org v's RDFa), even in the medium term. 
No chance.

- Steve

On 2011-06-17, at 01:02, Mischa Tuffield wrote:

> Hello, 
> 
> *excuse a little top-posting before comments coming inline ...
> 
> Great email Harry, I agree with your sentiment that schema.org shouldn't be 
> perceived as a massive thread to the SW community. If anything I find and 
> welcome the move, surely it will widen the audience of web-developers 
> interested in creating and authoring structure data to the web? A lot of 
> people write code, and work for companies who are heavily reliant on pleasing 
> Search Engines - SEO is big business. Let users get on with building stuff 
> with microdata/schema.org, and who knows they might even come round to using 
> the various W3C SW specs when they find their needs change, when they find 
> they want to interoperate with data whose primary focus isn't for human 
> consumption or SEO.
> 
> RDF satisfies more than one use-case, it is more than a SEO tool. Personally, 
> I make daily use of RDF, http, SPARQL (to name a few) within the software 
> platform we have built at Garlik (note that I have been too lazy to use other 
> email address) and it makes sense to us as a business, as we make good use of 
> developing software without being constrained by a database schema in a 
> relational database and we can pull in data arbitrarily. In summary, RDF via  
> GoodRelations in RDFa has shown that the work has made an impact in the world 
> of Search Engines, RDF/SPARQL is being used to power applications in a number 
> of companies big and small, RDF is being outputted by major commercial sales 
> houses, non-computer scientists are using it to represent their scientific 
> data, governments are using in the shape of linked data/SPARQL, this is all 
> good stuff ... more than one use-case - fundamentally engrained with the 
> notion of interoperability and the standardised representation of data 
> (awesome stuff!).
> 
> I am not trying to have a dig here about microdata or schema.org, or the 
> technology stack which builds on the aforementioned, I simply don't know 
> enough about it to comment. I do know that the SW technology stack is growing 
> strong though, and it is an open technology stack - being an optimist I feel 
> that open stuff will prevail. 
> 
> http://example.com/Annotation"/> 
> 
> 
> On 16 Jun 2011, at 22:09, Harry Halpin wrote:
> 
>> I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
>> bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
>> First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
>> engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
>> argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
>> Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
>> straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
>> use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
>> provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
>> a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.
> 
> Indeed, I do feel that schema.org has been very explicit about how people 
> with the given use-case can use their work to solve a real-world problem. 
> Many people make work out of getting their employer some awesome search 
> engine love. I went to a news related metadata talk (an rNews one - fantastic 
> work by the way), and chatting to people from their industry I noticed how 
> important it was to them. The use-case seemed to boil down to a standard way 
> to annotate new stories/documents to please search engines to push eyeballs 
> their way... this is great but I am convinced it is not the only contribution 
> the SW tech stack has to give to the world. I recall someone had stats re: 
> numbers of webpages vs numbers of rows in databases in the world...
> 
>> 
>> The reason people are upset are that they didn't use RDFa, but instead
>> used microdata. One *cannot* argue that Google is ignoring open
>> standards. RDFa and microdata are *both* Last Call W3C Working Drafts
>> now. RDFa 1.0 is a spec but only for XHTML 1.0, which is not what most
>> of the Web uses. Microdata does have RDF parsing bugs, but again, most
>> developers outside the Semantic Web probably don't care - th