On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 9:43 AM Sebastian Hellmann <
hellmann(a)informatik.uni-leipzig.de> wrote:
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