Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee Pushes Linked Data In MIT Course
ErMKutz writes "WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee is championing linked data — the idea of assigning web addresses to individual pieces of data to enable more intelligent information searches — much like he did now-ubiquitous Internet standards such as HTML and HTTP. But the ethic hasn't quite taken off yet, so he and a group of Boston tech and entrepreneurial all-stars are launching an MIT class to teach students linked data mechanics and fast-track the technology to market. They're combining engineering and entrepreneurial education in the hopes of launching viable linked data businesses or open source code at the conclusion of the course." I hope this shows up on OpenCourseWare.
Please bring back the BLINK tag.
hashes.
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout
So how do they connect
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Chunks of data that are
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
apparently related?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I just don't see where this seems like an overly useful thing. "linked data" - Linked in what way? What data? How is this different from what people already do with the web?
I must be missing something because this sounds like "hey, dump anything in a database to the web and give it an individual web link"..which doesn't sound all that useful.
Are HTML named anchors an example of data-naming? At least some browsers will render a resource around an anchor, if its name is given in the URL.
Applied to the web (and with a way to join two pieces of data) this can lead to a HTML-supported bottom-up approach, with no need for "a special way to #include files". People could then create welcome.html-piece, toc.html-piece, blogpost.html-piece and say index.html is *.html-piece.
This sounds pretty much like deep linking. which per wikipedia is
Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a website, instead of that website's main or home page. Such links are called deep links.
I remember hearing about a couple of lawsuits which were raised because of deep linking and i dont see how this is any different.
I can faintly hear the lawyer sharpening their tools right now......
What the hell?! Is this something I'd have to read TFA to understand?!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
One problem -- from a business perspective -- of linking data in a machine-understandable way is that it makes it much easier for third parties to use that data. At first that may seem like a good thing, but for many companies the data are the entire business. If a third party can quickly aggregate related data from many sites in a way that is more useful than the individual sites, those sources suffer. We're seeing this tension already with Google vs. publishers, where the data in question are news stories, and Google News is the aggregator. While linked data could be enormously beneficial for the user/consumer, the producers have little incentive to expose their intellectual property in a way that is easily used by other automated services.
Some of us what are old enough see so many "new" things that are repackaged "old" things that have been either forgotten about or simply over looked. Methinks this is another example. The implementation details may be different, but this idea was first promulgated in *1960*! http://www.xanadu.net/ refers...
There are inherent dangers of this level of linkage. One week,
person clicks link X: "We are at war with eurasia",
next week, clicks the same link "We were never at war with eurasia".
No one else see this? Archiving all information on the internet is one thing, but singularly cataloging and tagging every piece of information so that it can be accessed so easily is....well, dangerous.
While the irony of posting this on the internet is not lost on me, where all the collective information of mankind is at my fingertips, it just chills me to the bone to think that one day, phrases like "due process" and "freedom of speech" could be changed so easily.
The concept of linking huge amount of publicly accessible data is obviously worthwhile. The problem with the Linked Data movement is the current implementation. It is a total mess. The insistent attempts to pre-standardize open data have created a horrible bureaucratic monster. RDF, RDFS, RDFa, N3, RIF, SWRL, OWL, SPARQL, FOAF, SIOC, and a few others I forgot on top of XML. Every time you encounter a field with so many acronyms you know something horribly wrong is being developed. The consultants and enterprise "experts" will have a field day with this.
I wonder if there make the links rel="no-follow" :)
Office Photocopiers
should thank the gods for his good fortune and not hog the stage.
OK, I'll bite. What was B-L's 2nd successful contribution to the Web?
A similar course was offered last semester at UT Austin, but with more emphasis on cloud databases.
http://sites.google.com/site/cs395t10/
an "MIT Course" would accurately be an entire university department. An "MIT subject" is what they're talking about here.
Changes are already made within OpenSim And Second Life that fetch assets not by file protocol and UD, but by HTTP. Opensim(second life free version) can even load entire region data via http URL(implemented) within the last month.
For those that dont know, 1/3 of Linden Labs have been made redundant, and some bloggers suspect this is in response to the sudden reliasation that its all about HTTP and not about propriertry viewers any more.
In the day I used to load TGAs via C. Its interesting noting the source code in Opensim that loads a textures via HTTP.
Almost certainly this is a response to the percieved advantage of being facebbok like(rightly or wrongly).
A quick and dirty example: A persons 3D avatar(Colada mesh file ) is stored on their website. As they visit a 3D world in browser, the world takes their metadata(loads the mesh via HTTP URL) and other participants see that representation.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Same as with Jesus Christ. After the New Testament, He did nothing worthwhile. I think it all went to His head.
We already went once through that vaporware enfilade with Ted Nelson.
As a college professor, I believe that the primary goal of a class should not be to advance your personal agenda. Feel free to share your opinions with your students, but your primary purpose is to inform and inspire, not to brainwash.
I'm clearly in the minority on this one.
There are a lot of companies and organizations trying to champion linked data, but linked data is nothing if those same companies and organizations don't adopt standards and push them ubiquitously. That was the motivation behind http://commontag.org/. It's a semantic data set of interrelated semantic concepts from various sources, but with a pretty impressive line of companies backing it up and implementing it.
no that was bidirectional links. this is making every struct, and field, and datatype, individually addressable with its own long term uri. if we apply the google algorithm to that rather than only to webpages that link to each other (does google make use of #sections of a webpage in its indexing?), then we will be able to find out where the most important information is, in a more fine grained manner than currently.
the hope is this will greatly increase the utility to the resultant data mining.
not if the uri and the addressing scheme is based on a hash, then the resource wouldnt be able to be changed. if it were changed it would become a new resource with a new uri. look at the way decentralised p2p systems are evolving. many use dhts or even ring topologies where look up is not too slow.
hopefully if this becomes the underlying internet infrastructure then it is more efficient than these p2p schemes, but still i think including deniability and crypto hashes is very important. surely we can include a 128bit hash to go with every 100byte struct that has a 40byte uri.. the bloat is scary thats why we really need to design this right so that it scales.
xanadu which was an earlier bidirectional link idea would have been interesting and perhaps some of those idea could also be included. imagine if a server could notify google when its changed and even do some of the indexing in a decentralised way and then just rsync the parts that have changed, so we get near realtime updating in an efficient manner.
The semantic web is a huge scam.
designed to provide "research area" to computer science phds.. pick a random buzz word "rdf" "sparql" "owl" "n3" and then cue the grant money...