Data Love Step By Step

We often forget about the very basic steps for creating a project. There are no small achievements, each step in a process is rewarding by itself and help to build trust in what you are doing. I was reading again the section on Linked Data from Tim Berners-Lee‘s Design Issues.

Linked Data is part of the process of publishing data in a way that it will be useful for anyone else. It is all about creating awesome stuff. Often, the task seems daunting for organizations or individuals, when it is just a question of baby steps. In the Linked Data page, there are 5 steps for starting publishing data in a way that would be useful for everyone else.

• ★     make your stuff available on the web (whatever format)
• ★★    make it available as structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)
• ★★★   non-proprietary format (e.g. csv instead of excel)
• ★★★★  use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
• ★★★★★ link your data to other people’s data to provide context

One of the big benefits of digital assets is that the cost of putting online data and modifying them is lower than in the material world (an online phonebook can be updated in real time and then evolve). One of the big benefits of Linked Data is URIs for piece of data or concepts on this data. Extensibility comes for free because data are expressed with a graph (not like relational databases).

Small steps are cool and full of awesome. Sharing gives you plenty of love.