Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
"In the arts," argue the authors, "the pathetic fallacy is the act of ascribing human feelings to inanimate objects." The same sort of fallacy is informing internet data representations. "On the semantic web... researchers are (perhaps subconsciously) allowing the computer's internal representation of data to influence the way their tools present information to users." Specifically, the authors decrie the overuse of the "Big Fat Graph (BFG)." Note the terminology again: "By graph, we mean representations with nodes [ie., entities] and edges [ie., links] to model the relationships within the space represented." Anyhow, I don't think the authors' alternative visualizations are anything worth writing home about - but the point is well taken, that the BFG is over-used and not particularly useful.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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