Berners-Lee Pushes Linked Data In MIT Course

ErMKutz writes "WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee is championing linked data — the idea of assigning web addresses to individual pieces of data to enable more intelligent information searches — much like he did now-ubiquitous Internet standards such as HTML and HTTP. But the ethic hasn't quite taken off yet, so he and a group of Boston tech and entrepreneurial all-stars are launching an MIT class to teach students linked data mechanics and fast-track the technology to market. They're combining engineering and entrepreneurial education in the hopes of launching viable linked data businesses or open source code at the conclusion of the course." I hope this shows up on OpenCourseWare.

In Other Word:

[Anonymous Coward]

hashes.

Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout

Re:I don't get it

[BeardedChimp]

Nope, TFA is just as about enlightening as the summary.

Re:Dear Mr. Berners-Lee,

[pyite]

You could copy the existing system used by librarians all over the continent.

Except that not all libraries use it. A lot (like the university I graduated from) use the Library of Congress Classification [wikipedia.org].

Linked Data is a mess

[slasho81]

The concept of linking huge amount of publicly accessible data is obviously worthwhile. The problem with the Linked Data movement is the current implementation. It is a total mess. The insistent attempts to pre-standardize open data have created a horrible bureaucratic monster. RDF, RDFS, RDFa, N3, RIF, SWRL, OWL, SPARQL, FOAF, SIOC, and a few others I forgot on top of XML. Every time you encounter a field with so many acronyms you know something horribly wrong is being developed. The consultants and enterprise "experts" will have a field day with this.

Re:I just don't see...

[Tacvek]

The problem with most of the semantic web concepts is that it wants to add lots of metadata to everything, generally of a type that cannot be added automatically. I see how many people's music collections are extremely inconsistent with the metadata. Sometimes half the music is missing artist tags, and whatnot. Furter how many people actually have well tagged photo collections?

If people are not willing to tag their music and photos consistently, when it have active immediate benefits to them, what chance is there of getting them to tag information in their web pages, when that provides no immediate benefit, and quite possibly no benefit ever if the Semantic web does not catch on.

The idea of linked data on the other hand has a shot of working, but probably not in the way Tim Berners-Lee imagines it. RDF seems to have too much of a stigma attached to it.

Re:Linked Data is a mess

[slasho81]

Ha! REST and ACL. I knew I forgot some important acronyms there. ;-)

Joking aside, having a stable schema is important, but not letting the "ecosystem" decide what's best on its own is damaging because it leads to over-engineering (or "enterprising") by a minority which most often does not know what's best for the majority. It also leads to numerous unusable bureaucratic documents which take the wind out of anyone who's trying to do anything useful. I'm talking from personal experience here.

Know the saying "premature optimization is the root of all evil"? Well, premature standardization is a special case of that.