◆ Semantic Web Catalogue

Design issue

Adoption & incentives

Why would anyone publish or use it?

tension
Effort now against payoff later: who bears the cost of adding structure, who gets the benefit, and the chicken-and-egg of data without applications and applications without data.
also
Incentives, Uptake, Network effects, Discovery
scheme
design issues

Threads (4)

Long-running problems under this issue, told step by step. All threads.

  • Why would anyone add structure? 1998–2026 open 12 steps

    Who bears the cost of publishing structured data, and what makes it worth their while?

  • Can ordinary developers use it? 1987–2024 open 12 steps

    Can people who are not specialists build with linked data, or does it stay a tool for experts?

  • Who owns what the crowd built? 1998–2025 open 8 steps

    When volunteers build a database together, what stops whoever hosts it from closing it, selling it or shutting it down?

  • Who sets the standard? 2001–2024 open 8 steps

    Who gets to decide the Web's data standards: a consortium, a grassroots community, or the largest consumers of the data?

Who answered it

This issue's row of the map: which traditions' works mainly answer it, and the earliest from each.

traditionworksearliest
Hypertext
Knowledge representation
Databases
Machine learning
Web standards 2 Linked Open Data cloud diagram 2007
Search 3 Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia 2001
Social web
Open knowledge
Decentralized web
Libraries, archives and museums
Life sciences
Media
Geospatial
Commerce and supply chain
Government and law
Finance
Industry and engineering

2 of 17 traditions have taken up this question as a work's main issue; a work in several traditions counts in each. Same counts as the full map.

Timeline

Works on this question, its main or a secondary one, each shown once in date order; filter by tradition to follow one community. Bars run from start to end where both are known; marks people, projects and organizations still active. 2 entries have no date and are not shown. Hover over or focus an entry to draw its links. Scroll sideways, or use the decades above.

Lineage (5)

Works whose main question this is, by type, oldest first.

Writings 2

Projects 3

  • Linked Open Data cloud diagram 2007 project ★ seminal

    Diagram of datasets published as Linked Data and the links between them, first drawn in 2007 with DBpedia at its centre.

  • Rich Snippets 2009 project ★ seminal

    Google search feature announced in May 2009 that shows ratings, prices and other details in results, read from microformats and RDFa in pages.

  • Web Data Commons 2012 project

    Project that extracts microdata, RDFa, JSON-LD and microformats data from the Common Crawl web corpus and publishes it for research.

Also bears on this (25)

Concepts 2

  • Linked Open Data 2010 concept ★ seminal principle

    Linked Data published under an open licence. Berners-Lee's 2010 five-star scheme rates open data from 'available in any format' up to 'linked to other data'.

  • Embedded structured data concept technique

    Machine-readable data inside ordinary HTML pages, written as microformats, RDFa, microdata or JSON-LD and usually using the schema.org vocabulary.

Writings 9

  • The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine 1998 writing ★ seminal technique

    Brin and Page's 1998 paper describing Google and PageRank, which ranks pages by the links pointing to them; it showed that the Web's link structure could serve as a signal of authority, with no metadata needed from publishers.

  • W3C Patent Policy 2004 writing principle

    W3C policy adopted on 5 February 2004 so that its Recommendations can be implemented on a royalty-free basis: participants commit to license patents essential to a specification without charge.

  • Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags 2005 writing ★ seminal debate

    Clay Shirky's 2005 essay, from talks at O'Reilly ETech and IMCExpo, arguing that hierarchical classification is a habit of the shelf and that on the Web links and free tagging work better than expert ontologies; the best-known case for folksonomy.

  • 8 Principles of Open Government Data 2007 writing ★ seminal principle

    Principles written by thirty open-government advocates meeting in Sebastopol, California, on 7–8 December 2007: government data should be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary and licence-free.

  • Media Meets Semantic Web – How the BBC Uses DBpedia and Linked Data to Make Connections 2009 writing ★ seminal technique

    2009 ESWC paper by Georgi Kobilarov, Tom Scott, Yves Raimond and colleagues at the BBC and Freie Universität Berlin, describing how BBC Programmes and BBC Music used DBpedia and MusicBrainz identifiers to connect content across the BBC's site.

  • JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web 2014 writing ★ seminal debate

    Manu Sporny's January 2014 blog post, written days after JSON-LD became a W3C Recommendation, saying that better Web APIs, not the Semantic Web, motivated JSON-LD, and that keeping RDF out of sight was what made it usable.

  • Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure 2016 writing ★ seminal

    Nadia Eghbal's 2016 report for the Ford Foundation arguing that open-source software is public infrastructure, maintained by a few unpaid or underpaid people, and that nobody has taken responsibility for funding it.

  • Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV): A Gateway to Reusable Semantic Vocabularies on the Web 2016 writing technique

    Semantic Web journal paper describing LOV, a curated catalogue of reusable vocabularies that records how they link to each other, their versions and who maintains them, to help publishers choose existing vocabularies instead of inventing new ones.

  • Toward easier RDF: a proposal 2018 writing debate

    David Booth's November 2018 message to the W3C semantic-web list arguing that the whole RDF ecosystem, from SPARQL and OWL to tools, is too hard for average developers, the middle third by ability, and that education had not fixed it in fifteen years; it began the EasierRDF effort on GitHub.

Standards 10

  • Universal Product Code 1973 standard ★ seminal

    The US grocery industry's product barcode and numbering standard, chosen on 3 April 1973 from IBM's design; the first scan was a pack of Wrigley's gum in Troy, Ohio, on 26 June 1974.

  • XBRL 1998 standard

    Format for business and financial reports whose taxonomies define each reporting concept and its relations, begun by Charles Hoffman in 1998; regulators, securities commissions and tax agencies worldwide receive filings in it, and Inline XBRL embeds the tags in an ordinary HTML report.

  • Platform for Privacy Preferences 2002–2018 standard

    W3C Recommendation of 16 April 2002 for websites to state, in machine-readable form, what they do with visitors' data, so browsers could compare it with users' preferences. Few sites or browsers implemented it, and the W3C made it obsolete in 2018.

  • GoodRelations 2008 standard

    Martin Hepp's web vocabulary for products, prices and offers, adopted by Google, Yahoo, Bing and retailers such as Best Buy, and merged into schema.org in November 2012 as its commerce vocabulary.

  • Open Graph protocol 2010 standard

    Facebook's 2010 vocabulary of meta tags that turn a web page into a rich object when shared; the first version was based on RDFa.

  • Schema.org 2011 standard ★ seminal

    Shared vocabulary for structured data in web pages, launched in 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo, with Yandex joining later that year.

  • X Cards 2012 standard

    Twitter's meta tags, introduced in 2012, that control how a linked page is previewed in posts; like Open Graph, a platform vocabulary that most websites publish.

  • Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices 2017 standard

    Joint W3C and OGC guidance, first published in 2017, for putting spatial data on the Web rather than in downloads; its first practice is to give places and spatial things persistent HTTP URIs.

  • GS1 Digital Link 2018 standard ★ seminal

    GS1 standard for writing product identifiers such as GTINs as web URIs, so that a barcode or QR code on a pack resolves to information about the product; ratified in August 2018. It puts Linked Data identifiers on everyday goods.

  • GS1 Web Vocabulary standard

    GS1's terms for products, organisations and locations published as Linked Data and designed as an extension to schema.org.

Projects 4

  • IMDb 1990 project ★ seminal

    Database of films, television and the people who make them. It began in October 1990 as fan lists on the rec.arts.movies newsgroup, became a company in 1996 and was bought by Amazon in 1998; its data is proprietary, released only for non-commercial use, yet other databases link to its title and name IDs.

  • Wikipedia 2001 project ★ seminal

    Free, collaboratively written online encyclopedia launched on 15 January 2001 and run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its infoboxes and links are the raw material of DBpedia, YAGO and Wikidata.

  • PSI Directive 2003 project

    EU directive of 2003 setting minimum rules for re-using public sector information, which made re-use of government data a legal matter across the EU; revised in 2013 and recast in 2019 as the Open Data Directive.

  • The Movie Database 2008 project

    Community-built film and television database, started in 2008, whose free API made it the usual open alternative to IMDb for apps.

People and organizations (12)

Linked to works on this question; the number counts those works.

Alan Patterson · Anant Narayanan · Anja Jentzsch · Anshu Jain · Christian Bizer · Cory Doctorow · Google · Jamie Taylor · Natasha Noy · Richard Cyganiak · University of Mannheim · Yuqing Gao