Internet Alchemy

Jeni Tennison has written a wonderfully insightful post on RDF and HTML5. She caps it off with two sentences that every RDF advocate needs to pay attention to:

• so why not just stop arguing and use the spare time and energy doing?
• so why not demonstrate RDF’s power in real-world applications?

That’s all there is to say really. Stop waving hands around promising things will be great if only you did X. Get out there and build some things that actually make a difference.

Paul Miller has kicked off a twitstorm with his simple question: does linked data require RDF?. My contention is that Linked Data does absolutely require RDF. This is not a technical issue and its not one of zealots or pragmatists: its a marketing and branding issue.

The term Linked Data was coined to brand a specific class of practices: namely assigning HTTP URIs to abitrary things and making those URIs respond with RDF relating the things to other things.

Here very few of the ‘things’ are documents, instead they are people, places, objects and concepts.

That deliberately excludes many other practices of publishing data on the web such as atom feeds, spreadsheets, APIs and even many existing RDF use cases.

The purpose of giving things a brand is to engender recognition, familiarity and trust. When you open a can of Pepsi you know exactly what you are going to get. You know you will get a great user experience whatever Apple product you buy. When you buy Lego you can rely on all the pieces fitting together.

The Linked Data brand makes similar promises of quality and consistency. When you consume Linked Data you know it will be RDF so your tools will work correctly. You also know that the data will be using HTTP URIs to refer to real-world things so you can determine what the data is about. You can trust that you’re not suddenly going to be given some XML in a proprietary schema or CSV with text headings you will have to guess the meaning of.

The Semantic Web community has been notorious for its poor marketing over the past decade. Now just when it seems the community has found the right balance between technology and mass appeal it feels like people are trying to rip away that success for their own purposes. That is deliberately emotive language because brands are all about emotion.

I don’t want to see the Linked Data brand weakened because it destroys trust. That’s why I pushed back on Twitter. As all involved know I am a huge advocate of making more data available on the web for reuse. It makes me glad whenever I see people invest their time in publishing data in any format, but my heart sings when I see more Linked Data.

There are many situations where there are better approaches than Linked Data e.g. I would rather have a midi file than the RDF version. In many circumstances I would be glad of a spreadsheet – simple and convenient.

But we should not confuse these forms of data publishing with Linked Data. That would sow confusion and be counterproductive. The coming web of data will be a rich and varied space full of content and data in every format imaginable. A large part of that we will call Linked Data and when you encounter it you will be justified in expecting RDF and HTTP.

I welcome anyone who wants to share data on the web in any way. But play fair and use the Linked Data brand only when it uses the Linked Data rules.

It’s been an interesting week for embedding metadata in HTML. Yesterday I was exploring html5 microdata and today Google announce support for RDFa. At first this announcement seemed like a big deal – Google supporting the web of data in a big way, a real push into the world of open structured data. However, a closer look reveals that Google have basically missed the point of RDFa. The RDFa support is limited to the properties and classes defined on a hastily thrown together site called data-vocabulary.org. There you will find classes for Person and Organization and properties for names and addresses, completely ignoring the millions of pieces of data using well established terms from FOAF and the like. That means everyone has to rewrite all their data to use Google’s schema if they want to be featured on Google’s search engine. Its like saying you have to write your pages using Google’s own version of html where all the tags have slightly different spellings to be listed in their search engine!

The result is a hobbled implementation of RDFa. They’ve taken the worst part – the syntax – and thrown away the best – the decentralized vocabularies of terms. It’s like using microformats without the one thing they do well: the simplicity. This is why I believe Google missed the point. They made the mistake of treating RDFa as an alternative to microformats, which completely ignores its true strength as a structured data format.

As I twittered earlier: it seems odd that Google, a company that thrived on the open messy web, seeks to ignore it and go for a controlled vocabulary. I’m hoping that this is just a toe in the water and more will come. But there’s a part of me that thinks otherwise. Surely there’s no way the smart people in Google didn’t know about the existing vocabularies and data for people, places, reviews and businesses? We’ve all seen large companies claim support for key standards yet deliver partial or broken implementations and some companies use that as a deliberate tactic to undermine the standard itself, to break interoperability or make it impossibly hard. Its very easy for these situations to be explained away as a mistake, or as a work in progress, but we need to push and dig deeper and hold companies to their very public claims.

Stowe Boyd picks up on some very interesting research that suggests that people’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. Specifically the report includes this:

we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

I suspect the converse is true too. People stuck in networks of unhappy people will tend to be unhappier, which inevitably leads to their friends being slightly unhappier in return. I’ve seen this effect in organisations where people who are unhappy with their workplace tend to band together to share their unhappy experiences. When this group is in the majority then they may have the chance to change the organisation’s behaviour. However when they are in the minority, implying that the majority of the organisation are happy, then it becomes a difficult environment for them which increases their unhappiness, a spiral of despair that can bring the whole group down. That can be very damaging to the individuals, their otherwise happier peers and to the organisation itself. I wonder if this research indicates that these spirals can be unwound by the happy network reaching out to the unhappy one?