I found myself cringing watching this talk. Berners-Lee seemed so nervous, stressed out. Certainly under strain, for whatever reason. I hope he is/was okay, you know, generally, and that it was just that big red timer and the VIPs in the audience, or something equally obvious. I watched the video a couple of days after Bill Gates' talk about malaria, and sure, maybe linked data may end up saving the world'n'all, but I did cringe when he invited the audience to shout "Raw Data Now!". Especially when compared to Gates' letting mosquitoes out into the audience, it just seemed silly. Mmm. Now I'm sounding all holier-than-thou, huh.
IMHO TimBL did a great job at TED. I dunno where you have seen him stressed out - he certainly enjoyed it. Btw, linked data is mainly about URIs and HTTP and yes RDF (for the data model part) and some lightweight vocabularies such as FOAF, SOIC, Dublin Core, etc. - check out http://webofdata.wordpress.com as well, I blog there about it ;)
Cheers,
Michael
PS: To be honest, I was also sort of surprised to see him calling the audience like 'speak after me'. However, I was positively surprised - I really like when people put enthusiasm in things and not only give interesting but boring talks. In that sense I very much support TimBL to continue this (though, maybe not go as far as Steven B. at MS did with his infamous 'monkey dance' ;)
I thought he would be more articulate for a Swatty.
In order for linked data or semantic web to really take off someone really needs to break through with a proof of concept. Right now it is just extra work.
agreed. I haven't seen TBL do many(any) speeches before to compare - but he didn't seem comfortable at all. I support the idea (actually - it made me think a lot about Wolfram's alpha -- it seems to be a compiled version of what Tim is after) - but I thought the pitch for it was all wrong. The "Raw Data Now!" chant was cringe-worthy - even without comparison to BillG.
Open data would be a much more sellable concept if it was integrated into the development process in a fairly seamless way. If the application itself could be built around the open data standards, without obviously spending a lot of time on things that provide no immediate value, it would be much easier to justify.
My boss/client is not going to pay me to add REST interfaces and metadata that has only vague hypothetical future usefulness but he might pay me to build the data layer for the application in a way that just happens to also be somewhat open, especially if doing so makes the application better or easier to build.
To meet that requirement, the universal ontology stuff might have to be sacrificed but just having API access to more web apps, even if they are all proprietary, would be a worthwhile compromise.
Based on the video alone, I thought that was what TBL was proposing but I see from the links that he's still pushing the whole RDF rigamarole. That might catch on among a few large informational projects but the web at large is either going to ignore it or make a mess out of it.
The strength of RDF is in seamless data integration.
Think flexible data mashups (where you don't need to code to the interface of a particular service because they all use same linked data principles).
I have seen people build a simple application and then increase its value by automatically pulling in information from other large source of linked data such as DBPedia and GeoNames.
Fully agree that we need simple and understandable demos that show the value of linked data (assuming for a moment that linked data have business value :).
I want it to be trivial to make a greasemonkey script which adds people's small facebook profile photo into their news.yc profiles.
Or add a feature which lets me share a news.yc story on anything that implements a share-link interface - say, with my facebook friends, or my twitter followers, without leaving news.yc.
These things are possible right now, but doing them requires a lot of work, most of which would be duplicated (lots of html parsing, for example). How can we make it easier?
Here's another, if you want to get the gist of what I'm thinking:
When I go to news.yc from my work browser, display any blocker bugs assigned to me in our internal bug tracking application on top of the stories, in bold.
Again, this is doable in greasemonkey, but would should require a trivial amount of work with the right API's in place.
His ideas for the future of the web are vague at best, but the bottom line: the internet is only at its infancy.
In 10 years from now, the use cases and abilities of the internet are likely to be drastically different. His talk is just hinting at the ideas of whats yet to come.
I did not find a lot of info about his idea (Linked Data). Does anybody knows if there is a standard or something that is written at this time regarding his vision explained in this video?
[+] [-] tobych|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhausenblas|17 years ago|reply
Cheers, Michael
PS: To be honest, I was also sort of surprised to see him calling the audience like 'speak after me'. However, I was positively surprised - I really like when people put enthusiasm in things and not only give interesting but boring talks. In that sense I very much support TimBL to continue this (though, maybe not go as far as Steven B. at MS did with his infamous 'monkey dance' ;)
[+] [-] dbul|17 years ago|reply
In order for linked data or semantic web to really take off someone really needs to break through with a proof of concept. Right now it is just extra work.
[+] [-] whatusername|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] extension|17 years ago|reply
My boss/client is not going to pay me to add REST interfaces and metadata that has only vague hypothetical future usefulness but he might pay me to build the data layer for the application in a way that just happens to also be somewhat open, especially if doing so makes the application better or easier to build.
To meet that requirement, the universal ontology stuff might have to be sacrificed but just having API access to more web apps, even if they are all proprietary, would be a worthwhile compromise.
Based on the video alone, I thought that was what TBL was proposing but I see from the links that he's still pushing the whole RDF rigamarole. That might catch on among a few large informational projects but the web at large is either going to ignore it or make a mess out of it.
[+] [-] CaptSolo|17 years ago|reply
Think flexible data mashups (where you don't need to code to the interface of a particular service because they all use same linked data principles).
I have seen people build a simple application and then increase its value by automatically pulling in information from other large source of linked data such as DBPedia and GeoNames.
Fully agree that we need simple and understandable demos that show the value of linked data (assuming for a moment that linked data have business value :).
[+] [-] andreyf|17 years ago|reply
I want it to be trivial to make a greasemonkey script which adds people's small facebook profile photo into their news.yc profiles.
Or add a feature which lets me share a news.yc story on anything that implements a share-link interface - say, with my facebook friends, or my twitter followers, without leaving news.yc.
These things are possible right now, but doing them requires a lot of work, most of which would be duplicated (lots of html parsing, for example). How can we make it easier?
[+] [-] andreyf|17 years ago|reply
When I go to news.yc from my work browser, display any blocker bugs assigned to me in our internal bug tracking application on top of the stories, in bold.
Again, this is doable in greasemonkey, but would should require a trivial amount of work with the right API's in place.
[+] [-] jlm382|17 years ago|reply
In 10 years from now, the use cases and abilities of the internet are likely to be drastically different. His talk is just hinting at the ideas of whats yet to come.
[+] [-] juliend2|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CaptSolo|17 years ago|reply
Basic principles are simple: use URIs to describe things and provide useful information about these things when requested:
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
[+] [-] acangiano|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshu|17 years ago|reply
I wonder what's going to happen when you try to have actually dense data. I can't wait to download a 40gb fMRI file in RDF or whatever.
[+] [-] jemmons|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CaptSolo|17 years ago|reply