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The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for representing information in the Web. RDF has a simple data model that is easy for applications to process and manipulate. The data model is independent of any specific serialization syntax.

RDF provides information about resources through Resource Descriptions. A Resource Description consists of:

1. A subject resource identified by a URI
2. Zero or more relationships to other resources
3. Zero or more properties having literal values

A relationship comprises a pair of URIs: the first URI denotes the type of relationship, the second identifies the related resource.

A property comprises a pairing of a URI with a literal value. The URI denotes the type of property. The  literal value is a string with an optional datatype (denoted by a further URI) or language tag (as defined by RFC-3066)

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Nothing technically different from the existing formulation (I omitted mention of blank nodes for brevity only – they would still be present) but perhaps a lot easier for developers used to resource-oriented systems to grok.

Note: in the original version of this post I used the term document-oriented, but switched to resource-oriented on the suggestion of  Niklas Lindström

Note2: this formulation bears a striking resemblance to the HAL linking scheme for JSON

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: linked data, rdf, thought experiments ]]> http://blog.iandavis.com/2011/11/26/sketch-of-a-reformulation-of-rdf/feed/ 15 innovateer http://blog.iandavis.com/2011/08/21/google-author-rich-snippets/ http://blog.iandavis.com/2011/08/21/google-author-rich-snippets/#comments Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:21:07 +0000 Ian Davis http://blog.iandavis.com/?p=1604 Continue reading →]]> I spent a few minutes today following Google’s guidelines for declaring authorship of online content. Done properly this can enable Google to show a photo of the author and a link to them against search results containing their content. This is one form of rich snippet that Google are planning to roll out more widely soon.

You can see a preview of this working with the rich snippet testing tool in the image below:

To enable this I first had to associate my homepage with a Google profile. I recently  signed up to Google+ (reluctantly on my non-Google Apps account) and that can be used as a Google profile.

I added the following to http://iandavis.com/

<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/2/100424448589843669731/posts" rel="author me">google+</a>

I also made sure that my Google profile was connected to http://iandavis.com/ by editing the Links section of my profile. Once I’d done those two things I tested in the Rich Snippet tool and saw that my homepage was properly identified as belonging to me:

Then I edited my WordPress blog so that the about text on each blog page included a link to my homepage along with a rel=”me”. I already had the link back to my homepage so I just added rel=”me” to that link. I also made sure that http://blog.iandavis.com/ was linked from my Google profile. That was enough for Google to construct the chain of authority from the post to my homepage and through to their profile page:

This was a fairly simple process overall. The key to all this working is reciprocity. Each link must be reciprocated, i.e. my blog post must link through to my profile and my profile must link through to my blog’s domain. I’m still a bit fuzzy on the difference between rel=”me” and rel=”author”. I’m using author to link my homepage to my profile but me to link between authored pages and my homepage. My intuition is telling me that the author link is delegating the author relationship to my Google profile (or vice versa) but I don’t entirely grok it yet. More reading required.

Update: Here’s an example of what the rich snippets tool displays when there is no reciprocal link from your Google Profile to the page you are testing:

Paradoxically this excellent feature is also a significant factor in the slow adoption of RDF. The reason is that RDF is a general solution to the problem of merging disparate types and sources of data. If you don’t have that problem then RDF will always look inefficient, verbose and obtuse to you. Even if you are merging data today you’re most likely only doing it from a few known sources and it’ll be easier to write some custom code to do it for you.

I’ve heard many other arguments for the slow adoption of RDF over the years ranging from perceived deficiencies in the RDF model through obtuse XML formats and all the way up to techies being blamed for being bad at explaining RDF. I’ve been guilty of complaining long and hard about blank nodes and status codes. In reality, none of these things have any impact on the rate adoption of RDF because people won’t use it until they have the problem it solves.

This is a typical characteristic of technical paradigm shifts. No-one thought they had the problem of not being able to speak to anyone they liked wherever they were until the cellphone arrived and shifted expectations.

Right now, no-one realises they have the problem of not being able to merge and combine data from thousands of different primary sources. Most people aren’t thinking about it and those that do are facing an economic barrier, not a technical one. We know a general technical solution exists but the benefit/cost ratio needs to be high enough to warrant using a general solution over a custom one and today the costs of integrating data at scale are too high for most even given the massive benefits that could be possible.

There are organisations that are already merging and regularising data from thousands of sources but they’re paying the cost side of the equation just to get at the massive value they can generate. Government security agencies do it as do the largest consumer retailers and logistics firms. Google has a mission to organise the world’s information and we’re right in the middle of the big data startup era where founders and VCs are predicting huge returns from combining data at scale. Today these activities are seen as competitive advantage. That means there’s not much appetite for promoting a general solution that drives the costs close to zero and lets everyone get in on the game. A very few pioneers, notably Garlik, are using open standards like RDF to merge their data.

The primary cost that RDF itself adds to the benefit/cost equation is the effort you need to spend mapping all the data you need into the RDF triple model. You really need to persuade everyone else to publish RDF so you can consume it cheaply. This is where the Linked Data project has been very successful: however you choose to measure it there is a vast amount of data already in RDF. There is also growing body of data in other formats such as microdata that are pretty close to the RDF model and fairly cheap to consume. This aspect of the benefit/cost ratio is on the right trajectory.

A larger proportion of the costs in the equation have nothing to do with the data model or format used. They are costs inherent in the problem space itself: how do you know, for example, that the data you are depending on is accurate, available when you need it and legally yours to use? Until those issues of trust and quality are tackled effectively then people will stick to their small scale merges from a few trusted sources. This problem is huge and the solution can’t be rushed. It’s the area that Kasabi has in its sights and we’re going to do our best to help people overcome the fear inherent in using random data from untrusted parties.

My hope is that Kasabi plays the role of the cellphone and radically shifts expectations. Once people realise they have the problem of diverse data integration at scale the focus will then shift back to the technology. That’s where we’ll see competing approaches to solve the problem emerge and RDF will face its stiffest challenge of all: direct competition on its home territory.

If patent offices were actually held accountable for their decisions then there would be a strong bias towards ensuring that any patents granted were for genuinely novel breakthroughs. It would raise the bar for filing patents significantly since the patent office would seek to hedge the risk of being wrong by raising filing fees. But that’s right and proper surely? Patent offices grant hugely valuable monopolies as it is and the extra due diligence this idea forces them to perform would make those monopolies virtually unassailable. There should be a high bar to pass for something so valuable.

It’s not clear to me why, under the present system, the patent offices do any more than rubber stamp applications. What incentives do they have to perform any due diligence at all? There may be legislative reason for them to analyse each submission but without accountability it’s just waste in the system. Removing that waste reveals the basic function of a patent office today as a registrar of patent claims with all the due diligence performed post-hoc in the courts.

If we could move that due diligence process so it happens before a patent was granted then we would remove one of the largest hidden costs of innovation: the opportunity cost of avoiding patent thickets composed of potentially invalid patents.

A share-alike  patent is a standard patent but it embeds a default licensing agreement. Anyone may freely use the invention described in the patent but any subsequent refinement or innovation based on that patent must also be licensed using the share-alike license. Alternatively, if the licensee doesn’t want to put their invention under the share-alike terms then they can license the invention under a standard commercial license agreement as they do today.

This is the mild form of share-alike patent license. A stronger form would assert that any invention that is combined with the share-alike invention must also be licensed in the same way. This is analog of the viral combination terms in the GPL.

The net effect of this kind of patent would be to create an ever-growing a pool of inventions that are free to use for any purpose at no cost. Any inventor filing a patent in this way has the potential to earn royalties from their inventions as they do today. However they get the additional benefit of being able to quickly and freely combine their invention with any other share-alike patent removing a huge amount of go-to-market friction. Additionally the patent itself retains value so can still be classed as an IP asset when valuing a business. That should be pretty attractive to any entrepreneurial inventor.

At the same time it opens up the knowledge of the inventor as a public good just like the original patent system was intended to. Anyone can freely reuse the knowledge of the inventor. Licensees only pay if they want to close off knowledge, not if they want to open it.

Has anyone seen anything like this in use or being proposed before?

My hope is that an evidence base which shows that well-run companies can make more money without the patent system, taken alongside the substantial argument that there is a greater public good from freely licensed ideas, could agitate for the patent system to be shrunk, rather than grown.

That’s a fantastic and noble goal and is the spirit in which I hope to see more invention in the future but I think the public good argument is not going to persuade inventors to abandon the patent system. Even though expanding the public domain with inventions was one of the original goals of the patent system we’re way past that motivation now unfortunately.

Another interesting idea was PeerPatent which is a socially enforced patent system. The creators of PeerPatent see it as a stepping stone to something that may disrupt the patent system one day:

When an idea is defensively published on Peer Patent the user will also be able to define what is novel about their idea as a set of claims.  Other users then review and comment on the claims to determine whether they are truly novel, and depending on the results the claims may be awarded a PeerPatent.  This PeerPatent grants the user no legal rights to the idea, but allows them social recognition for originating the idea.  This system does not rise to the level of a patent alternative, but acts as a seed that may eventually grow into an alternative.

There was also many comments that suggested excellent reforms to the existing patent system such as reduced terms or forced licensing. However, I don’t think those reforms are going to get traction because there are huge vested interests working to preserve the status quo. Legislators should still pursue reforms but I don’t see any significant movement there for the next 3-4 decades. In fact the current economic climate is pushing governments towards increased protectionism and isolationism. For example in his speech on patent reform this June, President Obama stated he wanted to make it easier to file many more patents saying “we can’t give innovators in other countries a big leg up when it comes to opening new businesses and creating new jobs“. Of course as the leader of a nation he’s going to take the nationalistic us vs them stance, but it reinforces the flawed view that inventions are solely for competitive advantage, not for the advancement of knowledge and humanity.

I did have one new idea for disrupting the patent system over the weekend as I pondered the comments and suggestions people were sending: a share-alike patent which is the subject of my next post.

The patent system persists and must persist because companies have invested massively to carve out areas of that monopoly for themselves creating huge pools of future value. For example the pharmaceutical industry expects to lose $78billion in sales over the next 5 years simply from the natural expiry of old patents during that time. What does that imply for the the total value of the non expiring patents over that period?With that much at stake from a few old patents wouldn’t it make sense to invest a few billion to lobby for extended patent durations, broaden the fields of endeavour that can be patented or impose patent regimes on emerging companies? It does and companies do. What government would dare to face down the largest corporations on the planet, to be seen to be anti-innovation, a destroyer of value and of jobs?

Because of these interests the patent system can’t change from within and even if individual companies might want to break it making the first move is simply commercial suicide and they are forced to perpetuate the system just to survive.

I think the only way to remove this bad monopoly is to disrupt it from outside. I’m talking about a low-end disruption as defined by Clayton Christensen. Those kinds of disruptions are characterised by things that provide some of the benefits of the existing approach but at a dramatically lower cost and in a way that means the incumbents can’t compete without cannibalizing their existing revenue streams. We’ve just seen this play out in the music industry: online music started with a poorer experience (lower quality, hard to use, can’t display on your shelves) but was vastly cheaper (no physical distribution or stock costs) and the record companies resisted for years because to support it would mean cannibalizing their own physical music sales. The disruption is not over yet but I expect the outcome to be a massive diffusion of value away from the big 5 record companies out across the whole value network to new entrants resulting in a burst of new innovation.

So what’s the disruptor for the patent system? I don’t have the answer, but I have questions that might shine some light on an answer:

1. Why is there a single provider of the monopoly – government? What would happen if there were competing entities that could provide protection of ideas?
2. Is there a way to protect an idea through contract law? Perhaps a trade secret shared with licensees with non-disclosures. Independent invention would be allowable and exploitable.
3. Are there patent pool systems that provide favourable cross-licensing terms in return for voluntarily reducing the term of any patents not donated to the pool?
4. What about some kind of idea registry where it’s free to lodge an idea but you pay to browse and discover them? Companies could license an idea from the inventor via the registry which would compensate inventors. The Achilles heel here is that it doesn’t prevent external patent claims against the ideas in the registry.
5. How can crowdsourcing of prior art become sustainable? Can the book and journal digitisation programs be cross linked to subsequent patent claims? How can the effort of doing this be rewarded?
6. What is to patents as creative commons is to copyright?

Learning how to reflexively avoid stupidity is a key ingredient to attaining great heights with any skill. It’s amazing how many hours you can piss away trying add new and interesting techniques to your repertoire before you’ve really mopped up the basics.

I commented that perhaps a paraphrase of his “Stop doing stupid shit” principle was “avoid failure” but avoiding failure doesn’t necessarily bring success.

The European startup scene is often contrasted with Silicon Valley in terms of tolerance to failure. On the west coast investors are comfortable with previous failures recognising that they are great opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn and are evidence of appetite for risk.

But aren’t business failures hugely expensive lessons to take? Perhaps a typical entrepreneur has 2 or 3 failed ideas behind them before stumbling on even moderate success let alone getting to superstar level. Maybe that’s 2-3 million dollars of burned investment, 20-30 employees lives turned over, a few thousand consumers left without a product. Maybe an angel investor lawsuit for good measure.

That’s an expensive way to learn those lessons and you don’t know how many you ‘re going to need before you get successful.

The west coast startup mindset is to focus on finding the great idea and accept failures along the way.

Maybe a cheaper and more efficient way would be to prioritise avoiding failure to give yourself a the stability to iterate like crazy on ideas and find the one that’s going to have the impact you crave?

The NYCTA operates the Staten Island Railway and the New York City Subway which covers Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. The Kasabi dataset was converted from their publicly available transit data which they publish in GTFS format.

The dataset I published on Kasabi is pretty rich. It contains details of each of the 27 routes operated by the agency including the official colours of the lines for use on a route map. Those routes encompass 493 stops each one of which is geolocated with latitude and longitude. The agency operates 19,000 services on those 27 routes, where each service is a combination of schedule and the particular set of stop serviced, split into inbound and outbound portions. These services include a full outline of the route in geoJSON format too for plotting on maps. Overall there are over half a million data items describing which service calls at which stop on a particular day and time, including distinct arrival and departure times and whether the service picks up, drops off or both. Information about special transfers between stops is also included.

I created a set of sample SPARQL queries that should help you get started. I also created a new transit vocabulary for representing this kind of data which based on the GTFS format. I plan to publish more GTFS conversions in the coming weeks. Hopefully feedback on this current Kasabi dataset will improve the schema design and the future conversions.

To create them I first extracted all the shapefile data from the Ordnance Survey dataset. Because the OS publish shapefile data in their RDF I could do this by simply running a sparql query on the Ordnance Survey dataset (here’s an example of one of the GML shapefiles). That streamed out about 800MB of JSON results, maxing out my ADSL bandwidth much to the frustration of the rest of the family!

To make each of my datasets I sparqled the target dataset to extract all the geographic points then simply checked each OS shapefile to see if it contained any of the points. I used the os:within and os:contains properties defined by the OS to link the regions to the points they contain.

Here are the linksets I created:

• Ordnance Survey to Our Airports Linkset
• Ordnance Survey to OxPoints Linkset
• Ordnance Survey to Renewable Energy Generators Linkset
• Ordnance Survey to Traffic Scotland Linkset
• Ordnance Survey to UK Education Linkset

What are they useful for? Well, you can get a list of Norfolk’s renewable energy generators or find out which consituency or county council to inform about the traffic incident that caused the closure of the A93 Spittal of Glenshee on 6th July 2011.

Finally, I licensed these under CC0 so there are no restrictions on how you can use them.