Hi Thad,
On 20.09.19 15:28, Thad Guidry wrote:
With my tech evangelist hat on...
Google's philanthropy is nearly boundless when it comes to the
promotion of knowledge. Why? Because indeed it's in their best
interest otherwise no one can prosper without knowledge. They
aggregate knowledge for the benefit of mankind, and then make a profit
through advertising ... all while making that knowledge extremely easy
to be found for the world.
I am neither pro-Google or anti-Google per se. Maybe skeptical and
interested in what is the truth behind the truth. Google is not synonym
to philanthropy. Wikimedia is or at least I think they are doing many
things right. Google is a platform, so primarily they "aggregate
knowledge for their benefit" while creating enough incentives in form of
accessibility for users to add the user's knowledge to theirs. It is not
about what Google offers, but what it takes in return. 20% of employees
time is also an investment in the skill of the employee, a Google asset
called Human Capital and also leads to me and Denny from Google
discussing whether
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Graph is
content marketing or knowledge (@Denny: no offense, legit arguments, but
no agenda to resolve the stalled discussion there). Except I don't have
20% time to straighten the view into what I believe would be neutral, so
pushing it becomes a resource issue.
I found the other replies much more realistic and the perspective is yet
unclear. Maybe Mozilla wasn't so much frenemy with Google and got
removed from the browser market for it. I am also thinking about Linked
Open Data. Decentralisation is quite weak, individually. I guess
spreading all the Wikibases around to super-nodes is helpful unless it
prevents the formation of a stronger lobby of philanthropists or
competition to BigTech. Wikidata created some pressure on DBpedia as
well (also opportunities), but we are fine since we can simply innovate.
Others might not withstand. Microsoft seems to favor OpenStreetMaps so I
am just asking to which degree Open Source and Open Data is being
instrumentalised by BigTech.
Hence my question, whether it is compromise or be removed. (Note that
states are also platforms, which measure value in GDP and make laws and
roads and take VAT on transactions. Sometimes, they even don't remove
opposition.)
--
All the best,
Sebastian Hellmann
Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT)
Competence Center
at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig University
Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
Projects:
http://dbpedia.org,
http://nlp2rdf.org,
http://linguistics.okfn.org,
https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt
<http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt>
Homepage:
http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
Research Group:
http://aksw.org