Linked Enterprise Data Patterns Workshop
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the W3C Linked Enterprise Data Patterns workshop at MIT (#LEDP). After all, we do linked data and we work with large enterprise customers, so it seemed like a natural fit. The workshop was an interesting two days hearing folks share their experiences using linked data (and sometimes not using linked data) in enterprise situations (and sometimes not in enterprise situations). The main consensus that emerged from the workshop was a desire for a set of profiles of conformance criteria for what constitutes interoperable linked data implementations. I'm personally pretty certain though that the consensus ends there: people continue to have very different views of what pieces of the Semantic Web technology stack (or related technologies like REST and Atom) are most important for a linked data deployment. Eric Prud'hommeaux tried to classify the linked data camps into those doing data integration and storage and query and those doing HTTPy resource linking, but I'm guessing the distinctions are even more nuanced than that.
Anyways, on Wednesday I gave a talk on the patterns we use to segment data within Anzo, as well as some of our other usages of Semantic Web technologies and where we see gaps in the standards world (frankly, more in adoption than in specification). I recorded a screencast of the talk—it's not the most polished, but if you weren't able to attend the workshop you might be interested in the talk. I've also posted the slides themselves online. Here's the video:
There were a couple of discussions in the middle of the talk that I had to cut out because they involved too much cross-talk taking place far away from the mic and were hard to understand. One was a discussion around the way that we (by default) break data into graphs and how it privileges RDF subjects over objects, and whether that affects access control decisions (our experience: no). Another discussion around the 9 minute mark was about the use of the same URI to identify a graph and the subject of data within that graph. A third discussion surrounded ongoing efforts to extend VoID to do additional descriptions of linked data endpoints.