Agree locally, link globally.
I’ve been looking for a tee-shirt slogan for the Semantic Web - the title of this derives from somethign Keiron O’Hara wrote in an article we are working on - spun by me to resemble a more famous one… It’s not quite there yet, but I thought I would capture it here before I forgot, and also seek feedback
July 7th, 2006 at 4:48 am
“Publish locally, link globally”?
What I really want to say with the first word is, “Get the data you personally care about into RDF”.
I’m not so fond of “agree” because it’s a bit redundant. Agreeing to use the same vocabulary terms is, in the end, just another way of linking.
Nice idea though.
July 7th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
I think you make a good point, if stuffs not in RDF we’ve not even started. But if you create a bunch of RDF that lives in some vocabulary that no one can see or share (i.e. you don’t have a dereferencible namespace URI, preferably with RDFS or OWL, but at least human readable) it doesn’t encourage the linking that builds the network effect. Using standard vocabularies like FOAF, as opposed to rolling ones own, is clearly a way to do this. But a common misconception, and error in my opinion, is the idea that “everyone” needs to agree on something before it can be used - whereas even a few people using a common vocabulary can really make a valuable contribution to the Sem Web — so “Agree locally” was meant to capture that idea - I’m a well-known critic of big upper ontologies, I think they are trying to get “global” agreement, and that’s a real mistake.