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.)
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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
Homepage: http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org