jd/adobe

I think RDF and Linked Data is great.

My only point is that humans like URLs interesting text and pictures and links to other interesting items. They like to create things and interact. Machines like semantic free primary keys, strongly typed data and foreign keys to one-to-many relationships.

There is a tremendous opportunity in give humans better tools to bridge this gap. However, the idea of intelligent agents and machine learning has done a lot of damage.

Guy

We need to specify what’s meant by effective traversal though. Yes, agents with access to the query layer can query more effectively. But humans with access to a faceted browsing layer can wander more effectively. And it’s the guided wandering that will help motivate them to contribute the stuff the agents can then find.

> (constructucted and instructed by humans
> via new generation Linked Data aware
> solutions)

Ah. Good. We’re back on the same page finally :-)

If both were structured, then yes. But Wikipedia isn’t, so no.

Jon, please send me an email when you get a chance.

The New Orleans City Council is talking about considering CAPSTAT in a future Governmental Affairs Committee meeting.

AI singularity of the Semantic Web is simply an unfortunate misunderstanding. What is most important to note at this point in the Web’s evolution is the emergence of the relevance of “Linked Data” i.e., structured data that is interlinked using the very essence of the Web (HTTP).

What is still somewhat difficult to relay to humans is the fact that that nice looking pages don’t increase the number of hours in a day (which will always be 24). The Web is generating information at a rate that far exceeds the processing power of human beings, so the solution ultimately lies in a human-machine realionship that is inherently symbiotic. This is what “Linked Data” facilitates, and in the case of the Parallax example, simple envisage Parallax taking you the the location in a network from where you can optionally beam a query.

Jon: If you go back to our last podcast, I made a comment about SPARQL and XQuery. SPARQL will find the resources, and XQuery would allow you to get granular with the literal content associated with the discovered resources (if you are so inclined re. drill-down). Parallax is fundamentally unveiling a substrate that is more effectively traversed by agents (constructucted and instructed by humans via new generation Linked Data aware solutions) :-)

The irony for me is that RDF and the Semantic Web was supposed to be the machine understandable Web, as opposed to the HTML human facing Web. As it turns out, only the humans can make any sense out of the inconsistently encoded and incomplete data of a Data 2.0 mash-up. Humans actually love to navigate through a network of loosely typed links and chance associations.

The AI singularity of RDF inference seem a distant dream.

My thoughts on Mark’s Comments and the possible emergency of Semantic Enterprise are here RDF and Data 2.0

Guy

Indeed.

> how can you motivate people to do this in
> the corporate setting [where there is no
> worldwide audience]

This is the age-old problem for corporate groupware. Part of the answer is to maximize the attention rewards that accrue from self-interested contributions.

The reciprocity built into Freebase is an intriguing social hack, I’ve argued elsewhere, because in the act of enhancing my stuff I’m exposed to your related stuff which I’m incented to enhance so that it in turn further enhances my stuff. The process leads us naturally to notice our mutual stuff, and can also raise the likelihood that others will notice it too.

Since Freebase entries tend to be composed from smaller atomic parts, none of which would meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion, that’s unlikely to happen.

It’s a really interesting question as to how stuff /could/ flow back though. Minimally by external linkage, I guess.