So Long, and Thanks for All The Triples – OKG Shuts Down by Eric Franzon.
From the post:
I take no pleasure in being right.
Earlier this week, I speculated that the Open Knowledge Graph might be scaled back or shut down. This morning, I awoke to a post by the project’s creators, Thomas Steiner and Stefan Mirea announcing the closing of the OKG.
Eric and the original announcement both quote: Jack Menzel, Product Management Director at Google, as making the following statement:
“We try to make data as accessible as possible to people around the world, which is why we put as much data as as we can in Freebase. However there are a few reasons we can’t participate in your project.
First, the reason we can’t put all the data we have into Freebase is that we’ve acquired it from other sources who have not granted us the rights to redistribute. Much of the local and books data, for example, was given to us with terms that we would not immediately syndicate or provide it to others for free.
Other pieces of data are used, but only with attribution. For example, some data, like images, we feel comfortable using only in the context of search (as it is a preview of content that people will be finding with that search) and some data like statistics from the World Bank should only be shown with proper attribution.
With regards to automatic access to extract the ranking of the content: we block this kind of access to Google because our ranking is the proprietary core of what Google provides whenever you use search—users should access Google via the interfaces we provide.”
I can summarize that for you:
The Open Knowledge Graph (OKG) project is incompatible with the ad-driven business model of Google.
If you want the long version:
- …not granted us the rights to redistribute.” Google engineered contracts for content that mandate its delivery/presentation via Google ad-driven interfaces. The “…not granted us…” language is always a tip off.
- …but only with attribution.” That means the Google ad-driven interface as the means for attribution. Their choice you notice.
- …ranking of content…block….” Probably the most honest part of the quote. Our facts, our revenue stream and we say no.
Illustrates a problem with ad-driven business models:
No ads, no revenue, which means you use our interfaces.
Value-add models avoid that but only with subscription models.
(Do you see another way?)
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