Linked Open Vocabularies, please meet Google+

The Google+ Linked Open Vocabularies community was created more than one year ago. The G+ community feature was new and trendy at the time, and the LOV community gathered quickly over one hundred members, then the hype moved to someting else, and the community went more or less dormant. Which is too bad, because Google+ communities could be very effective tools, if really used by their members, and LOV creators, publishers and users definitely need a dedicated community tool. We made lately another step towards better interfacing this Google+ community and the LOV data base. Whenever available, we now use in the data base the G+ URIs to identify the vocabulary creators and contributors. As of today,  we have managed to identify a little more than 60% of LOV creators and contributors this way. 

Among those, only a small minority (about 20%) is member of the above said community, which means about 80% of this community members are either lurkers of users of vocabularies. It means also that a good deal of people identified by a G+ profile in LOV still rarely or never use it. One could think that we should then look at other community tools. But there are at least two good reasons to stick to this choice.

Google+ aims at being a reliable identity provider. This was clearly expressed by Google at the very beginning of the service. The recent launch of "custom URIs" such as http://google.com/+BernardVatant through which a G+ account owner can claim her "real name" in the google.com namespace is just a confirmation of this intention. "Vanity URLs" as some call them, are not only good at showing off or being cool. My guess is that they have some function in the big picture of the Google indexing scheme, and certainly something to do with the consolidation of the Knowledge Graph.

We need dynamic, social URIs. I already made this point at the end of the previous post. And the more so for URIs of living and active people. Using URIs of social networks will hopefully make obsolete the too long debate over "URI of Document" vs "URI of Entity". Such URIs are ambiguous, indeed, because we are ambiguous. 

The only strong argument against G+ URIs is that using URIs held by a private company namespace to identify people in an open knowledge project is a bad choice. Indeed, but alternatives might turn to be worse.