Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Deconstructs a Bag of Chips
itwbennett writes "At the O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Expo, being held this week in Washington, DC, Tim Berners-Lee compared the concept of linked open data to a bag of Utz Kettle Classics Crunchy Potato chips: 'The outside of the bag contains different sets of information, each using a different vocabulary and coming from a different source, Berners-Lee explained. The front of the package displays the name of the brand and the company's own marketing claim that the chips are crunchy. The back of the package has nutritional information, such as calories and vitamins, defined by terms generated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Finally, there is a Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code on the bottom of the package, which is not understood by humans at all but rather is recognized by scanning machines globally as the moniker for the item. In other words, this single package of information actually is a collection of data and attributes that have been developed by multiple parties, not just Utz.'"
that is news for nerds, since when? They talk about information and transmission of information, but I see nothing about entropy, shannon's law or even mentioning that the rule of markov chain applies here, and the amount of information transferred to the end user can be only worse or equal to the amount of information that has been put on the label.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Much tastier than the average car analogy.
I'm English you insensitive clod! My bag of chips is hot, greasy and with no writing on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga1aSJXCFe0
Nomnomnomnomnom.
And besides, it's crisps. Both he and I are British!
Yes, but my bag of Potato chips does not relay the number of chips and their associated calories and fat content back to the vendor, who then sells the information to my health care provider who then raises my rates because I am a risky eater. (At least, not yet....)
Later that day Tim used some toilet paper and noted that although the manufacturer said that it was a soft as a cloud, cloud computing is not ready for the toilet yet.
TBL uses nutritional information on a bag of potato chips as an example of effective communication at a conference in a country with epidemic obesity rates.
Sorry, TB-L, you've completely lost me. Come up with something about tubes or cars - or GTFO.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The front of the package displays the name of the brand and the company's own marketing claim that the chips are crunchy. The back of the package has nutritional information, such as calories and vitamins, defined by terms generated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
And there are fat nerds consuming the chips, too!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Transmission of information through labels.....that is news for nerds, since when?
Since it concerns Sir Tim, the guy who literally invented the web. If Linus Torvald was hired to design the new Chevy Camero, it would also be news worthy on /. When important people in the technology industry do interesting things that may or may not be directly related to actually compiling code, some of us nerds like to know.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Well as it's already spoiled for you, I might as well look at his analogy further. I'm not sure exactly what point he thinks he's making here, but what it says to me is that people don't look at the ingredients list or where things come from. They just look at the branding on the front. That's important for the minority of groups that actually produce content on the Internet. Nobody will think of you. They'll just see Yahoo or Google or Gizmodo or whatever slapped on the front of what you make and that's as far as it goes. You don't have to do anything other than package up other people's ingredients and sell it as your own to make a profit. Just ask Slashdot. ;)
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Yeah, I think Utz are limited to the North East of the United States. He probably should have said Lays if he at least wanted the whole United States to understand.
He's wrong. Utz developed all the information put on the package (with the possible exception of the base part of their UPC number). Some of the information is required to be there by others, but they don't create the information. Some of the formats (the bar code, for example) are created by others, but they don't create the information. Further, none of that information is guaranteed to be correct, and the only party responsible if it's not is Utz.
Hm. Did somebody forget to check "Post Anonymously"?
Grandma Utz's are fried in lard. Old school, sinful, delicious lard. Where does that fit in his analogy?
http://www.utzsnacks.com/products/grandmachips.html
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I don't think that was his point at all. His point was that "linked open data" would be the next big thing on the web. Basically multiple related datasets all linked to each other to make things like research much easier. In other words, he thinks the next evolution of the web will be what everyone thought would just naturally happen when the concept of hyperlinks was first adapted to the Internet, but turned out to be much harder than anticipated: the ability to easily find data related to whatever dataset you were looking at.
This is essentially an extension of Berners-Lee's "Semantic Web" concept. First, the Semantic Web comes along and somehow enables an automated way to figure out what documents on the web are "about", presumably through something more sophisticated than the much-abused meta keywords of yore. Once you can tell what every individual page is about, you can use this linked open data concept to link all of the different pages that are about related things. Presumably, you could eventually link everything to everything else in a giant mesh sorted by topic. This is different from the search engine-based topology we have now wherein multiple pages get linked to from a search engine, but are usually not in any way linked to each other.
It's all a very interesting concept but seems much harder than Berners-Lee might think to actually implement. Our ability to computationally glean the topics covered by any given data set is primitive at best, and even if we could figure out how to do that reliably you'd still have the same problems we've had with every other similar system: Lack of cooperation between entities, entities trying to game the system to their own ends, and good old fashioned vandalism. I'd like to think that eventually something like this could exist, because it would basically bring into being the vision of what the web could become when it was first introduced. Right now it's little more than an abstract idea, though.
"Oh shit, my speech, I forgot all about it! I shouldn't have stayed out drinking until 2am last night..."
"Must find inspiration, quickly..."
*sees chip bag in garbage*
"Ah, a chip bag! Maybe I can use this somehow..."
*scrawls some notes*
"Hey this might just work..."
*15 minutes of feverish writing*
"YES! An entire speech on linked open data based on a bag of chips. My career is safe!"
"Hey, maybe I'll even get a few cases from Utz as a thank you for mentioning them..."
You are an idiot. There is no credit given to anyone fucking stupid enough to post GNAA. lol
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
No kidding. A terrifying amount of critical buisness logic is embedded in Excel spreadsheets because MBAs can't fathom what a relational database much less why it's a Good Thing that you can't simply put any kind of data you want anywhere and he thinks that we can add semantic metadata correctly to everything on the web?
Carefully read what you initially posted, and then think about who exactly might be a "stupid idiot."
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Yeah, I know it was TBL's point. It's mine, saying what the packet of crisps metaphor really suggests, I think. I agree with you about the difficulty of implementing a "semantic web". But TBL is an academic in a tall tower, very far removed from the coal face of actually trying to code up some of this stuff. I think when we do start reaching the point of a semantic web, we're going to have to come up with some very clever ways of keeping bias out of the system (i.e. your people trying to game the system).
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Say goodbye to whatever karma you had and say hello to a lot more freaks. I see you have a lot already, and only four fans (one of whom has "troll" in his name).
Free Martian Whores!
here
The semantic web is another w3c scam, just like the huge XML scam. But fortunately this time nobody is really buying into it.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
One point I derived is seems to follow from his choice of product packaging as the example: Here on Slashdot, you often see self announced Libertarians posting about how government policies are arbitrary, or perhaps 'esoteric' or 'arcane', or divorced from reality. Maybe what the FDA requires on a package of chips is something logically needed for a quite sensible purpose - it only looks arbitrary or unnecessarily complex because it's a 'language' very different from the front panel's 'advertisese' or the machine readable barcode.
Note that most people don't really parse the advertising either, they get what the advertiser wants them to get, with the spin the advertiser wants, like getting what the browser preinterprets of a site's HTML. But advertising is focused on being comfortable for the viewer, not on having real value in the content or actual transmission of ideas. (You can put a big, green "!!!Only 9 calories per serving!!!" blurb on the package, and bury the fact that "A serving is 1/4 Oz. of chips - this package contains 132 servings", in small print somewhere on the bottom edge, and most people won't actually get the facts, they will just feel better about eating a whole bag of chips.). But, most people, including the above mentioned Libertarians, won't mention how that packaging is 'arbitrary', 'esoteric' or 'divorced from reality'. Some data-types seem to draw this criticism very commonly, while other's don't, even if it may be entirely justified.
Who is John Cabal?
"Linked data is data you can click on. It will take you to another data set."
I've thought since early 2000's that our data structures (like JSON) need the concept of a pointer. What would it look like? A URL, of course -- a URL pointing to yet more JSON data.
{"name": "Lion Kimbro", "favorite color": "yellow", "homepage": "http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/", "friends": [http://example.org/joel, http://example.org/whit, http://example.org/phil, http://example.org/amber%5D}
The idea here being that you have API support to dereference, say, friends[0], when you make use of it. The data is pulled and connected up with the local memory system when it's used.
I'll take this potato chip...AND EAT IT!
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Potato-Chips/Detail.aspx
that would be a base version feel free to hack as required
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You're full of shit. You only get one bonus; even if you're a subscriber* with excellent karma, you start out at +1, not +2. And your post (the one I'm responding to) sits at -1 as I look at it, an hour after you posted it.
If you hate slashtot, just GTFO. We don't like you, either (I note you're listed as "foe of a friend").
*I have a subscription that some kind anonymous soul provided, and my karma's been excellent since a week after I got this account back.
Free Martian Whores!
This is a weird post for you. I specifically remember your strange nick and some good comments made in the past. Hopefully your account has been hacked.
See?
All I see is -1 flamebait and -1 troll. Nothing to "see" here. Now go away, boy, you bother me.
Free Martian Whores!
Being inducted into the GNAA dose not constitute "credit" in any form I am aware of. Idiot.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?