[ckan-discuss] Linked Open Data star badges

Fri Dec 10 16:58:10 GMT 2010

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 5:26 PM, William Waites <ww at eris.okfn.org> wrote:
> This is a good point... Maybe these badges could go along with the
> openness icons?

I'd like to discuss their practical usefulness first. While I agree
the five star system is a fantastic PR measure, I'll personally take a
3 star CSV table over a 5 star RDF graph any day if I want to create
an open data application. Many fantastic formats, including things
like Shapefiles, JSON data, SVG, etc. would be under-valued in this
system, while important factors such as the availability of a contact
person, the completeness and detail level of the data, the frequency
of updates etc. remain irrelevant. 5 star is about conformity to the
ideas of a particular branch of the academic community, not use value.
Yet by displaying them on CKAN we would suggest just that. Wouldn't we
rather try to display some proper indicators of quality?

Friedrich

p.s. I actually worry about the consequences of the 5 star system on
open data as a political goal. This classification simplifies the
problem of releasing data, giving it a clear advantage in
communications with non-technical policy makers. Yet this could lead
to other important factors (such as the ones mentioned above) not
being considered, while a lot of effort is put into translating things
into RDF for no particular reason.

> Cheers,
> -w
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Antoine Zimmermann <antoine.zimmermann at insa-lyon.fr> -----
>
> Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:23:36 +0100
> From: Antoine Zimmermann <antoine.zimmermann at insa-lyon.fr>
> Subject: Re: Linked Open Data star badges
> To: Michael Hausenblas <michael.hausenblas at deri.org>
> CC: Linked Data community <public-lod at w3.org>
> Message-ID: <4D0245F8.4070702 at insa-lyon.fr>
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; fr; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.6
>
> Michael,
>
>
> Good job, I like the look of these badges.
> However, I'm wondering: will the people who have a 0 or 1-star dataset
> put a badge on their Web page? It's like putting a badge saying "HTML
> page /almost/ valid: 3 errors only!"
> In the end, I guess only the 5 star badge will be proudly displayed by
> dataset owners.
> Still, I think those badges have a utility, but not for the dataset
> owners. I can imagine a web page listing existing, independent datasets
> (such as [1]) where each row has the corresponding badge. This way, one
> can immediately and visually determine the level of interoperability of
> the dataset.
>
>
> [1] http://esw.w3.org/DataSetRDFDumps
>
>
> Cheers,
> AZ.
>
> Le 07/12/2010 11:09, Michael Hausenblas a écrit :
>>
>>If you want to express your support for LOD data on your dataset Web page,
>>you can now use the LOD badges [1] to do so. The LOD badges are based on
>>TimBL's 5-star data scheme, which has been made available via [2].
>>
>>Cheers,
>>       Michael
>>
>>[1] http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/lod-badges/
>>[2] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
>>
>
>
> --
> Antoine Zimmermann
> Researcher at:
> Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d'information
> Database Group
> 7 Avenue Jean Capelle
> 69621 Villeurbanne Cedex
> France
> Lecturer at:
> Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon
> 20 Avenue Albert Einstein
> 69621 Villeurbanne Cedex
> France
> antoine.zimmermann at insa-lyon.fr
> http://zimmer.aprilfoolsreview.com/
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
> --
> William Waites
> http://eris.okfn.org/ww/foaf#i
> 9C7E F636 52F6 1004 E40A  E565 98E3 BBF3 8320 7664
>
> _______________________________________________
> ckan-discuss mailing list
> ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss
>