Jeni's Musings

Thanks very much for the series on linked data - really helpful and will be useful in getting people using RDF. As an outsider looking in and with an interest in health data, the sample data set in RDF raises some questions. You will be familiar with them, and I know it isn’t the purpose of this series to address them, but this excellent series raises them acutely:

1 Return on investment. Getting data into good RDF requires significant intellectual and financial investment. Maybe we should JFDI but at the moment there’s little sense of return. This wasn’t the case with HTML which gave immediate return even to novice hackers.

2 Error/bugs. If a visualisation/analysis isn’t coming out right (which is often the case) the fact that the underlying data is in RDF makes it more difficult to track down the source of the problem - is it the data or the metadata or the queries?

3 Change. You could say that data in RDF is more open to change than badly structured data, but arguably it is less so. It seems (with RDF) that you need to commit to a well-specified set of concepts at the outset and it will be tempting to stick with those even when reality has moved on.

Anyway, thanks again for this excellent series!