[okfn-discuss] ANN: Uberblic.org - Integrating the Web of Data

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

On 29/01/2010 16:18, Mr. Puneet Kishor wrote:
>> There is so much open and often linked data available on the web, but
>> there has been a lack of an integration service tying together all that linked
>> data into a more coherent experience.

> This is great, but how is it different from http://ckan.net?
>
> Having a service like this is extremely necessary, but having too many
> services like this, especially ones that overlap, might lead to
> confusion. Clarity of purpose vis a vis existing efforts might be very
> helpful.

Well, that's how the semweb, or Web of Data, or Linked Data Web, is 
likely to look in the short term. Lots and lots of aggregation services 
collecting different subsets of the universe of triples. Re-aggregating 
other sites, moving eyeballs around.

You can see a reflection of this in social network cross-posting and 
aggregation services, for example FriendFeed. This was bought by 
Facebook, I imagine because it was potentially or actually diverting 
traffic away from FB.

An online service like FriendFeed collects your communication streams 
from different sites together. A client like Posterous or even Tweetdeck 
lets you send messages through to multiple sites. It matters less and 
less where the information is made, where it is stored, as long as it 
can be discovered.

Yes this leads to a lot of redundancy. We have got used to the 
centralised, one-ring-to-rule model for types of online services, 
redundancy can be confusing - one never knows exactly where to look, and 
everything is slightly deja vu.

Years ago I worked on a prototype online service for a kind of 
self-organising, distributed art festival in London. It pulled in RSS 
listings from different event sites, correlated that with spatial RDF 
from the OpenGuides wiki, FOAF maps of participants...

The event curators loved the *idea*. When they were presented with the 
actual prototype, the main response "there are seven versions of this 
event here. Which is the real one?"

Puneet, I think we just have to get used to overlap.


jo
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