Linked Open Data (LOD) and Science
MUSIL just came back from an inspiring workshop on how to enable science through linked open data. More on this in a separate post later.
A different question, raised by the Linked Spatio-Temporal Data workshop at GIScience today, is what science questions are raised by LOD. It is exciting to see the many projects where something useful or promising is just done through LOD. And yet, as researchers, we need to be careful to lift these efforts from war stories to science. Otherwise, we will soon have “LOD Science” advertised by some people, just like “Web science” and many other new emperor clothes in recent times. A simple litmus test is this: if you cannot state your problem without any acronyms, they are not yet lifted to science.
So, what are the research questions raised by LOD? Here are a few suggestions emerging from today’s workshop discussions:
- What is location (for LOD)?
- Beyond points (try LOD on the Rhine or Danube…)
- Reasoning about identity (beyond sameAs)
- Adequately combining geometric and logic reasoning
- Using space and time as general enablers (rather than a “geo domain”)
- Dealing with change (in reality, in knowledge)
- Dealing with multiple conceptualizations (avoiding naïve realism)
- Dealing with multiple natural languages (e.g. Spanish, Chinese)
- Expressing uncertainty and trust
- Dealing with privacy.
