Comment by extension | Hacker News Reader

Comment by extension | Hacker News Reader

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 :).

That's an example of value derived from consuming generic data, but how do you get value from providing it?

Providing generic third party access is a rare case in business. Usually, data is used by third parties for a specific purpose that requires substantial domain knowledge, in which case an RDF description is probably redundant and useless.

There may be business models based on generic data but those businesses will face a serious bootstrapping problem as they will likely require either a critical mass of generic data providers or consumers, which are mutually dependent.

The bootstrapping will have to be grassroots, as it was for the original "unstructured" web, which succeeded due to the ease of publishing HTML documents, which is much simpler than publishing structured data.

I concur. We have largely solved the publishing issue with linked data. Now we aim to realise the read-write Web of Data - http://vimeo.com/3663028 is a screen cast explaining and demoing how this can be done (and this is a grass-rooted, open community project building upon deployed and already used technologies whilst offering a generic processing model - consider signing up and contribute!)

Cheers, Michael

"how do you get value from providing it" - how do you get value from publishing anything on the web? The same principles apply. The value comes from making information more readily available, so people can find out new things, make connections, do their jobs better. If you want to make money from it (and of course a lot of data has already been paid for by the taxpayer) then you can do all the usual stuff: charge for access, charge for services built on top of the data, provide it free and use it to build your brand or to gain attention of people that can be sold to advertisers etc.

One important use case is publishing data for re-use within an enterprise or other organisation - it doesn't necessarily need to always be public.

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