Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space (The Online Book)
The Principles of Linked Data:
1. Use URIs as names for things.
2. Use HTTP URIs, so that people can look up those names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL).
4. Include links to other URIs, so that they can discover more things.
First observation/question
What made the original WWW proposal different from all hypertext systems before it?
There had been a number of hypertext systems before the WWW, some with capabilities that the WWW continues to lack.
But what make it different or perhaps better, successful?
That links could fail?
Oh, but if we are going to have a global data space that identifies stuff, it can’t fail. Yes?
So, we are taking a flexible, fault tolerant system (the World Wide Web) and making it into an inflexible, brittle system (the Semantic Web).
That sounds like a very, very bad plan.
Second observation/question
Global data space?
Even allowing for marketing puff, that is a bit of a stretch. Well, more than that, it is an outright lie.
Consider all the data that is now being collected by the Large Hadron Collider in the CERN. So much data that data has to be discarded. Simply can’t keep it all.
Or all the data from previous space missions and astronomical observations, both visible and in other bands.
Or all the legal (and one assumes illegal) records of government activity.
Or all the other information, records, data from human activity.
And not just the documents, but the stuff people talk about in them and the relationships between the things they talk about.
Some of that can be addressed or obtained over the web, but that isn’t the same thing as identifying all the stuff talked about in that material on the WWW.
Now, if Linked Data wanted to claim that the WWW was a global data space for information of interest to a particular group, well, that comes closer to being believable at least.
*****
However silly a single, unifying data model may sound, it is true that making data more accessible, by any means, makes it easier to make sensible use of it.
Despite having a drank the Kool-Aid perspective on linked data, this book is a useful introduction to it as a technology.
Ignore the “…put your hand on the radio and feel the power…” type stuff.
Keep saying to yourself: “it’s just another format, it’s just another format…,” and you will be fine.