The Problem with RDF and Nuclear Power by Manu Sporny.
Manu starts his post:
Full disclosure: I am the chair of the RDFa Working Group, the JSON-LD Community Group, a member of the RDF Working Group, as well as other Semantic Web initiatives. I believe in this stuff, but am critical about the path we’ve been taking for a while now.
(…)
RDF shares a number of these similarities with nuclear power. RDF is one of the best data modeling mechanisms that humanity has created. Looking into the future, there is no equally-powerful, viable alternative. So, why has progress been slow on this very exciting technology? There was no public mis-information campaign, so where did this negative view of RDF come from?
In short, RDF/XML was the Semantic Web’s 3 Mile Island incident. When it was released, developers confused RDF/XML (bad) with the RDF data model (good). There weren’t enough people and time to counter-act the negative press that RDF was receiving as a result of RDF/XML and thus, we are where we are today because of this negative perception of RDF. Even Wikipedia’s page on the matter seems to imply that RDF/XML is RDF. Some purveyors of RDF think that the public perception problem isn’t that bad. I think that when developers hear RDF, they think: “Not in my back yard”.
The solution to this predicament: Stop mentioning RDF and the Semantic Web. Focus on tools for developers. Do more dogfooding.
Over the years I have become more and more agnostic towards data models.
The real question for any data model is whether it fits your requirements. What other test would you have?
For merging data held in different data models or data models that don’t recognize the same subject identified differently, then subject identity and its management comes into play.
Subject identity and its management not being an area that has only one answer for any particular problem.
Manu does have concrete suggestions for how to advance topic maps, either as a practice of subject identity or a particular data model:
- The message shouldn’t be about the technology. It should be about the problems we have today and a concrete solution on how to address those problems.
- Demonstrate real value. Stop talking about the beauty of RDF, theoretical value, or design. Deliver production-ready, open-source software tools.
- Build a network of believers by spending more of your time working with Web developers and open-source projects to convince them to publish Linked Data. Dogfood our work.
A topic map version of those suggestions:
- The message shouldn’t be about the technology. It should be about the problems we have today and a concrete solution on how to address those problems.
- Demonstrate real value. Stop talking about the beauty of topic maps, theoretical value, or design. Deliver high quality content from merging diverse data sources. (Tools will take care of themselves if the content is valuable enough.)
- Build a network of customers by spending more of your time using topic maps to distinguish your content from content from the average web sewer.
As an information theorist I should be preaching to myself. Yes?
😉
As the semantic impedance of the “Semantic Web,” “big data,” “NSA Data Cloud,” increases, the opportunities for competitive, military, industrial advantage from reliable semantic integration will increase.
Looking for showcase opportunities.
Suggestions?