webr3.org

Earlier today I was reading an interesting post by Georgi Kobilarov entitled "What’s wrong with the Linked Data world, part 1 - Keyword Search"; this particularly sparked my interest because in all honesty "search" had never came in to my vision of the semantic web / linked data world.

To me, the draw of linked data and the semantic web has always been exploration; the notion that even the most unskilled of publishers should be able to enrich their content via semi-automated software to the standards of a near perfect wikipedia article has always been the driving force. Additionally, content classification, relation, linkage, data centralization and the like are all major benefits which will make a vast difference to the usability of the web.

Search will always be a major part of the internet, at the moment we use search to find content on a specific subject, then search again to find more, and search again to find related or expanded info, help, facts, answers, whatever; however, in the future I hope to see search move to a less prominent role, one where we use search to find the most suitable "entry point" in to the web of linked data - and from there every other piece of related / expanded information is either on page, or a click (link) away.

Some major hurdles need to be jumped before we can get to that stage though, both through lack of organization and lack of appropriate software. Personally I have a mental blueprint / overview of what's needed (imho), and some very specific ideas on the software side, with any luck I'll get a chance to contribute + build some of this, we'll see.

Some thoughts of what's needed from my little brain.

Linked Data Ping
A central service API which is pinged by all software as it publishes information with machine accessible content. (Needed way before (x)HTML+RDFa takes off). Provides a stream of all recent pings to be consumed (xmpp pub-sub?).

Clustered Servers holding a centralized data GUID lookup and proxy.
In essence all resources on the net should be a linked pair of GUID to endpoint, each endpoint should contain a reference to the GUID, and each GUID should be a URI which redirects to the endpoint, endpoints change GUID/URI stays unique. In an ideal scenario when somebody creates a link to X resource or Y document, the publishing/controlling software should replace the endpoint with the GUID instead. This would also enable multiple other services such as centralized pingback, references, statistics etc.

Machine Readable Data Cache.
Together with the aforementioned services a high availability database of cache'd information should exist; in principal this would work by reading the stream of "Linked Data Pings", getting the GUID for the content and then retrieving all machine readable data and caching it. Much like the RDF data exposed through dbpedia, however for everything. Even if only a predefined subset of the common rdf vocabularies was stored and exposed it'd be enough to start, from there all other domain specific ontology could be retrieved by reading the endpoint itself.

Semantic CMS
Ideally we need a new breed of CMS, one that not only has simple FOAF and Dublin Core (~Drupal 7), but also support for full content enrichment using the aforementioned machine services; and provides a simple UI for manually exposing entities, events, facts etc. (Think highlight name in text, mark as Person with Name, system finds guid and builds relevant RDFa and we have another triple of linked data.)

The possibilities from this point are endless; if you're reading this document after all this has been made, then you'd see a whole host of in text links through to more information on each keyphrase, person, entity etc; you'd be aided by auto injection of sources, related reading, comments, further documents discussing the content here, in short you'd be exploring the net one click at a time, linked data all the way; not searching.

In summary (and very much imho), Linked Data is not for searching, it's for linking data - search was invented to address the issue that everything isn't linked, when it is then the link takes precedence again.

My only worry in all of this, is the idea that all rdf triples are fact, and true - already the major search engines are exposing rdfa data in summaries, 5* ratings on products and suchlike, the room for abuse will only get worse.

Thanks Georgi for placing the spark that clarified my current thoughts.

Finally, this isn't a biased opinion in anyway, or an endorsement, but to me openlink virtuoso, dbpedia, zemanta and open calais are leading the way and enabling all of this; together with the hard working folks contributing to the various linked W3C projects and specs. If only dbpedia/zemanta/calais would unify there uri's/guids/endpoints we'd be a lot further along.. (well I would ;).

Regards!