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.
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?
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
It sounds like it's more related to this TED talk, rather than skipping over a "content provider's" "branding" to "steal" their "content". The model would likely require a more active sense of purpose towards participation and making the data available, rather than having stuff online and some random person linking to it without "permission"
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.
The problem with most of the semantic web concepts is that it wants to add lots of metadata to everything, generally of a type that cannot be added automatically. I see how many people's music collections are extremely inconsistent with the metadata. Sometimes half the music is missing artist tags, and whatnot. Furter how many people actually have well tagged photo collections?
If people are not willing to tag their music and photos consistently, when it have active immediate benefits to them, what chance is there of getting them to tag information in their web pages, when that provides no immediate benefit, and quite possibly no benefit ever if the Semantic web does not catch on.
The idea of linked data on the other hand has a shot of working, but probably not in the way Tim Berners-Lee imagines it. RDF seems to have too much of a stigma attached to it.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
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.
This latest effort strikes me as a less ambitious version of the semantic web, and we may have seen a glimpse of it in Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram's ego aside Alpha does have merit and if the state of the art can advance as far as finding context in the written word then it's a damned good start; recognising faces and locales appears comparitively simple.
Call me a cynic if you want, but I strongly doubt that people in general will manually tag and classify their photos, movies, songs etc. This doubt seems ever more justified as the rate at which we accumulate personal data increases.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.