Making Linked Data work isn’t the problem
Georgi Kobilarov captures an essential question when he says:
But neither Linked Open Data nor the Semantic Web have really took off from there yet. I know many people will disagree with me and point to the famous Linked Open Data cloud diagram, which shows a large (and growing) number of data sets as part of the Linked Data Web. But where are the showcases of problems being solved?
If you can’t show me problems being solved then something is wrong with the solution. “we need more time” is rarely the real issue, esp. when there is some inherent network effect in the system. Then there should be some magic tipping point, and you’re just not hitting it and need to adjust your product and try again with a modified approach.
My point here is not that I want to propose any particular direction or change, but instead I want to stress what I believe is an issue in the community: too few people are actually trying to understand the problem that Linked Data is supposed to be the solution to. If you don’t understand the problem you can not develop a solution or improve a half-working one. Why? Well, what do you do next? Which part to work on? What to change? There is no ground for those decisions if you don’t have at least a well informed guess (or better some evidence) about the problem to solve. And you can’t evaluate your results.
You could easily substitute topic maps in place of linked data in that quote.
Questions:
Putting global claims to one side, write a 5 – 8 page paper, with citations, answering the following questions:
- What specific issue in your library would topic maps help solve? As opposed to what other solutions?
- Would topic maps require more or less resources than other solutions?
- Would topic maps offer any advantages over other solutions?
- How would you measure/estimate the answers in #2 and #3 for a proposal to your library board/director?
(Feel free to suggest and answer other questions I have overlooked.)