OH: Data
I recently had the opportunity at SXSW to hear LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman speak about Data 3.0. Today I went back to the future at Data 2.0 Conference, at which I was a panelist and on the Program Committee. There were over 500 in attendance and many familiar faces, such as Mike Driscoll, Hjalmar Gislason, Gil Elbaz, and OrenMichels. It is becoming very clear to me about where we are and we’re were going with respect to the data web. Call it what you want, but here it is as I see it:
Provenance. Where does your data come from? How accurate is it? My response: who cares! Well, of course you should care, but only to the extent you have a baseline to measure against. I can tell you all day long my data is better, but if I can’t prove it against the competition, then it is simply marketing speak. I believe provenance will become less important and user reviews will become more important.
Structure v Semantics. What does normal even mean? Your normal is probably different than my normal so why should I force my normal on you? Structure is enough. As long as the data is structured and in machine readable format, it can become easily usable. On the Data Ecosystem panel, Oren put it plainly, “it is so much bigger an issue to have the data in the first place”.
APIs. Gil Elbaz says Data 3.0 is “millions of APIs”. I agree. We have the construct that each dataset is a single API, with one or more different ways to query it. As we go from tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands, and ultimately to millions of datasets, we will indeed have millions of APIs!
T’s & C’s. Will creative commons or open database license win? The more important question is who is going to enforce these licenses and how. Are we going to see hackers being taken to court for violation of these licenses? My first job in law school was in the rights and permissions group atZiff Davis Media. I was in charge of finding and enforcing infringing uses of our trademarks and copyrights. The vast majority of the infringing users didn’t care and didn’t change their behavior. Ziff Davis did nothing about it. The reality is that bits are just that, bits, and its what you do with them that matters.
I will leave you with this: it is not the size of the bit, but the relevance of the data.
