Actually, most of my experience with RDF is confirmation of how little we understand what language is for us and our willingness to project meaning where it doesn’t live.

I would not be surprised that RDF has power as a data structure in very well-circumscribed domains where the using community can maintain a coherent conception of the application. But as a hammer looking for nails, I find RDF as worrisome. And, amidst from the misappropriation of “ontology” I wonder if we will every figure out what the “semantic” bit is (although it is, I suppose, an ontological commitment of sorts to grant being to whatever semantics is with regard to RDF).

Hey, I’ve been too long without a Dorothea fix, and I am overjoyed (whatever that means).

On the honor-transfer note between publishers and researchers, I think it’s a question of game theory, publications get rewarded by publishing the best articles, researchers for being published in the best journals. Unfortunately our current system also rewards for number of publications when you get below the top tier. There needs to be ( but won’t be ) a restructuring of the system to not reward quantity. One proposal I’ve heard floated is to only evaluate profs on the top N articles ( good luck figuring out a decent criteria to judge that ) and journal rankings by the bottom M articles they publish.

The publishers feel they are bestowing honor on the researchers by accepting and publishing their manuscript, and the researchers feel their research output and projects are giving honor and prestige to the publication. And this, I think, is where the challenge lies – to convince each group that their honor resides within themselves, and isn’t transferred between one or the other in order to become legitimate.

Because I don’t. Give that a think for a bit.

I think there’s also a structural difference in what you do versus what I do. Conscientious Z. Objector at YPOW, unless s/he is in your management chain, can’t really do much to hinder your work, aside from the usual committee noise that is the price of working in academic librarianship. You’re a techie. You’re not going to find a Trojan in your IDE because you ticked somebody off.

I work in scholarly communication. I’m one of four librarians on an immense campus who does (going by job titles; obviously it’s a leetle more complicated than that). It doesn’t take much to derail what I can accomplish. Simple non-cooperation will do it, never mind whisper campaigns or the like.

So, you know, it’s not exactly my career I worry for. I could move on, though I don’t want to; I love where I live, and I also love that library-school teaching is becoming part of my job. That wouldn’t happen just any old where.

I worry a lot about how what I say off the clock affects what I can get done on the clock. And I also worry that were I to decide to move on, the reputation my less-than-temperate comments have given me among the rank-and-file librarians I would still depend on to get work done would both damage my chances of securing other employment and make success in that employment a significantly dicier proposition.

“[Academic libraries] that welcome publicly outspoken librarians.” Name me three. I suspect there’s a reason a lot of our best bloggery comes out of places like OCLC. I also suspect that this same worry fuels editorial columnists at publications like Library Journal. (Which is not, I hasten to add, a bad thing!)

While I have generally avoided taking any public potshots at at my place of work, I have on occasion STILL been told colleagues that they thought a blog post (which didn’t mention any place of work and which I didn’t really mean to target at any place of work) made them look bad, and they didn’t appreciate it. For every once or twice someone has actually told me this, presumably there are many more times they’ve thought it but haven’t. But I’ve never been ‘called on the carpet’ by a superior, just told informally by colleagues.

Nevertheless, while I try to react to this feedback by writing more carefully, I don’t get too worried about my ‘career’ because of it — precisely because I know the _net_ effect of my blogging is WAY positive for my career, and will make it significantly easier to get a job elsewhere in what would otherwise be a difficult market, if required. Not that I’m looking, I’m happy where I am.

A nitpick, but HTTP would be a better example. TCP/IP is to “the internet” as HTTP is to “the web”. The twin standards of HTTP (transport) and HTML (content) are what created the web, and were indeed succesful at doing it.

Richard’s analogy of HTML->web as RDF->linked-web is a good one for his argument, it is somewhat thought-provokingly persuasive. But I still tend to fall on your side of things.

I guess I lack faith that RDF _will_ catch on in the ways semantic web enthusiasts hope (predict?). The analogy with HTML can be returned too — what factors led to the actual success of HTML? It’s technical superiority for solving certain problems is probably NOT it. (If it even has such superiority, it’s really a pretty inelegant hacky standard from some perspectives). Probably more to do with the ultimate success of HTML/HTTP was the incredible simplicity of creating simple web pages that _worked_ (even if they were not actually ‘legal’, as many of them were not!), without having to know what you were doing.

What does “working” means in that ‘the web’ context? Provide content that can be easily accessed by other clueless users, and easily linked to by other web authors. Creating, as this caught on, the, well, “web” of content that we know and love/hate.

What does “working” mean for “linked data”? (This question does not neccesarily have a simple or universally agreed upon answer, and it’s difficult to be all talking about the same thing until we know what each other means by this, which we don’t really).

How likely is RDF to catch on in order to achieve that? How possible is it for non-RDF to achieve that kind of “working”? How difficult is it for the individual to use RDF to achieve that “working”? If that “working” _requires_ some fairly challenging work to achieve… what does that say for the likelyhood of the “working” goal occuring? Is there a way to approach “working” with less challenging means (than RDF?), means where simple things are incredibly simple and complexity of implementation rises proportionally to complexity of goals?

I think the web, even the early web, was more than those three things.

I write this as someone who was pretty confident, back in 1993 or thereabouts, that the web would fail compared to gopher. The reason was, the web needed all those existing documents to be re-coded into HTML, whereas gopher just let you serve them up. So I clearly got that wrong; people (slowly at first, but with ever-gathering pace) saw enough of the advantages to do that recoding, and by late 1994 I was giving courses to librarians on HTML.

But what does that say wrt RDF and Semantic Web or Linked Data? Almost nothing, except that RDF (and a superstructure of vocabularies) does seem to be a simple, reductionist way of expressing enough kinds of data constructs and connections, that enough people see value in, that it is gathering pace. Who would have believed two years ago the quantities of Linked Data we have available now?

I don’t think most researchers should have to think in RDF terms, any more than most researchers have to think in HTML terms. More of the former than the latter, perhaps, as there is ten years’ less maturity in Linked Data, so the tools are… well, crap. But if your data are in structured form right now (eg in a database), then making them available as RDF is something your favourite geek can probably do in much less than a weekend.

It does seem to have something of the momentum of the late 1990s web!

Though I like to think he would have if he’d been around. It’s worth recalling that the web itself was not infrequently seen in its early days as taking a too rough-and-ready approach to interoperability. There were other networked hypertext systems out there, after all, ones that in many ways were quite graceful from a purely formal standpoint.

The web? No way to follow links *back* as well as forward! Why, there’s no guarantee the links will even *work*! And don’t get started on HTML– it may *claim* to be SGML-compliant, but most web pages just string tags together, and don’t pass formal validation at all!

Yet somehow the Web managed to take off stratospherically where the other hypertext systems didn’t. It was enough to have something that basically worked for the common use cases, and had a modicum of structure on which additional services could be built. (You can use Google, referrer logs, or Technorati to find out who’s linking to you, for instance; that capability didn’t have to be baked into the Web architecture itself.)

Similarly, I think that if linked data’s going to really take off, people will have to accept, and find better ways to cope with, the inevitable messiness that occurs when people put data online. Yes, that means that sometimes people will incorrectly refer to objects instead of documents, or vice versa, or (to take a library example) works instead of expressions, or any of the many pet peeves one sees recurring in mailing list discussions. You either deal with that, or you resign yourself to engaging with a niche instead of the world.

I *do* think RDF has a place at the table, but not as the one-format-to-rule them all. It may also be the case that bits of the RDF will sneak in through the back door (look at Facebook’s drop-dead easy Open Graph Protocol work — it’s just HTML!). Reuse-friendly vs. Not resuse-friendly is a continuum, not an all (RDF) or none (not-RDF) proposition.

My real concern is that we are operating on two separate tracks — the Linked Data side forges ahead w/ a specific vision, and the rest of the world blissfully ignores. I would love to see the Linked Data movement take a more realistic approach and accept the fact that the viewpoint you express here is *widely* held (if not in specifics, in basic conclusions). Of all the work happening right now, efforts like the Open Graph Protocol are the most exciting. I also happen to think that JSON offers an absolutely superb format for data that is drop dead simple to create, share and reuse (e.g., check out an Picasa Web album in Google’s JSONC format in a nice JSON viewer: http://bit.ly/brZdSU as-simple-as-it-gets “linked data”).