Advertising RDF and Linked Data: SPARQL Queries on EU Data
From the webpage:
This is a collection of SPARQL queries on EU data that shows benefits of converting it to RDF and linking it, i.e. queries that reveal non-trivial information that would have been hard to reconstruct by hunting it down over separate/unlinked data sources.
At first I thought this would be a cool demonstration of the use of SPARQL, with the queries as links and more fully set forth below.
Nada. The non-working hyperlinks in the list of queries I suspect were meant to be internal links to the fuller exposition of the queries.
Then when I get to the queries, the only one that promises:
Link to query result: http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/eures/sparql
Returns a 404.
The other links appear to be links to webpages that given a SPARQL, which if I had a SPARQL client, I could paste the SPARQL query in to see the result.
I would mirror the question:
Effort of obtaining those results without RDFizing and linking:
with:
Effort to see “…benefits of convering [EU data] to RDF and linking it” without a SPARQL client, very high/impossible.
That’s not just a criticism of RDF. Topic maps made a different mistake but it had the same impact.
The question for any user is “where’s the beef?” What am I gaining? Now, not some unknown number of tomorrows from now. Today!
PS: The EU data cloud has dropped the “Linked Open Data Around-the-Clock” moniker I reported in September of 2011. Same place, different branding. I suspect that is why governments like the web so much. Implementing newspeak policy is just a save away.