The Law of Linked Data » AI3:::Adaptive Information

Description

A Marshal to Bring Order to the Town of Data Gulch

Though not the first, I have been touting the Linked Data Law for a couple of years now [1] . But in a conversation last week, I found that my colleague did not find the premise very clear. I suspect that is due both to cryptic language on my part and the fact no one has really tackled the topic with focus. So, in this post, I try to redress that and also comment on the related role of linked data in the semantic enterprise.

Adding connections to existing information via linked data is a powerful force multiplier, similar to Metcalfe’s law for how the value of a network increases with more users (nodes). I have come to call this the Linked Data Law : the value of a linked data network is proportional to the square of the number of links between data objects.

“In the network economy, the connections are as important as the nodes.” [2]

An early direct mention of the semantic Web and its possible ability to generate network effects comes from a 2003 Mitre report for the government [3] . In it, the authors state, “At present a very small proportion of the data exposed on the web is marked up using Semantic Web vocabularies like RDF and OWL. As more data gets mapped to ontologies, the potential exists to achieve a ‘network effect’.” Prescient, for sure.

In July 2006, both Henry Story and Dion Hinchliffe discussed Metcalfe’s law, with Henry specifically looking to relate it to the semantic Web [4] . He noted that his initial intuition was that “the value of your information grows exponentially with your ability to combine it with new information.” He noted he was trying to find ...

Original URL

http://www.mkbergman.com/837/the-law-of-linked-data/

http://www.mkbergman.com/837/the-law-of-linked-data/