Jeni's Musings

When we encourage people to put their data on the web as linked data, the biggest question is “How?”. There are so many “How?” questions to answer:

• how do we choose what URIs to use for things?
• how do we choose what vocabularies to use?
• how do we handle changing data?
• how do we tell people how the data was created?
• how do we publish it?
• how will other people know about it?

and, of course:

• how do we create it?

As we encourage linked data adoption within the UK public sector, something we run into again and again is that (unsurprisingly) particular domain areas have pre-existing standard ways of thinking about the data that they care about. There are existing models, often with multiple serialisations, such as in XML and a text-based form, that are supported by existing tool chains.

In contrast, if there is existing RDF in that domain area, it’s usually been designed by people who are more interested in the RDF than in the domain area, and is thus generally more focused on the goals of the typical casual data re-user rather than the professionals in the area.