Sebastian Schaffert posted a message on the pub-lod@w3c.org list that raised several issues about Linked Data. Issues that sound relevant to topic maps. See what you think.
From the post:
We are working together with many IT companies (with excellent software developers) and trying to convince them that Semantic Web technologies are superior for information integration. They are already overwhelmed when they have to understand that a database ID for an object is not enough. If they have to start distinguishing between the data object and the real world entity the object might be representing, they will be lost completely.
I guess being told that a “real world entity” may have different ways to be identified must seem to be the road to perdition.
Curious because the “real world” is a messy place. Or is that the problem? That the world of developers is artificially “clean,” at least as far as identification and reference.
Perhaps CS programs need to train developers for encounter with the messy “real world.”
From the post:
> When you dereference the URL for a person (such as …/561666514#), you get back RDF. Our _expectation_, of course, is that that RDF will include some remarks about that person (…/561666514#), but there can be no guarantee of this, and no guarantee that it won’t include more information than you asked for. All you can reliably expect is that _something_ will come back, which the service believes to be true and hopes will be useful. You add this to your knowledge of the world, and move on.
There I have my main problem. If I ask for “A”, I am not really interested in “B”. What our client implementation therefore does is to throw away everything that is about B and only keeps data about A. Which is – in case of the FB data – nothing. The reason why we do this is that often you will get back a large amount of irrelevant (to us) data even if you only requested information about a specific resource. I am not interested in the 999 other resources the service might also want to offer information about, I am only interested in the data I asked for. Also, you need to have some kind of “handle” on how to start working with the data you get back, like:
1. I ask for information about A, and the server gives me back what it knows about A (there, my expectation again …)
2. From the data I get, I specifically ask for some common properties, like A foaf:name ?N and do something with the bindings of N. Now how would I know how to even formulate the query if I ask for A but get back B?
Ouch! That one cuts a little close. 😉
What about the folks who are “…not really interested in ‘B’.” ?
How do topic maps serve their interests?
Or have we decided for them that more information about a subject is better?
Or is that a matter of topic map design? What information to include?
That “merging” and what gets “merged” is a user/client decision?
That is how it works in practice simply due to time, resources, and other constraints.
Marketing questions:
How to discover data users would like to have appear with other data, prior to having a contract to do so?
Can we re-purpose search logs for that?