[okfn-labs] I think there's a better way

Fri May 17 08:52:16 UTC 2013

Hi Donald,

I don't find myself *sending blobs* exciting at all. Instead prefer *granting access*, *replicating*, *syncing* etc. Also I find stuff like pdf documents, odt, speadsheets etc. rather retro and look forward to express information for human eye in HTML as much as possible.

When it comes to linking data, I find concept of Linked Data very attractive. Among any news I just heard about Google adding support for JSON-LD in gmail: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/reference/formats/json-ld

With technologies like WebID + access controll I see very interesting possibility of creating collective knowledge graphs with powerful linking! I hope soon to experiment more with http://viejs.org and similar technologies...

Cheers :)
☮ elf Pavlik ☮

Excerpts from Donald McLean's message of 2013-05-17 03:55:04 +0000:
> Have you ever had a file/document you couldn't open because you didn't have
> the right application? Or perhaps you could open it, but not in the
> application you wanted to use, because that app didn't support that format?
> Is there really so much difference between an email and a text document?
> Between a to-do list and a contact?
> 
> Why can't we link data together more seamlessly? My emails from my friend
> Bob should be linked to his contact information, and the pictures of him,
> and the calendar entries for what we have planned. If my company hires a
> new guy who's going to work on a project with me, shouldn't I just be able
> to send him everything relating to the project, all in one blob?
> 
> These are just a few of the clues that lead me to conclude that the
> file/document based approach to storing information on computers could be
> replaced with something better. For several years I've been working on this
> problem and I have a few ideas.
> 
> Is this kind of work of any interest to this group?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Donald