Linked Data Is Merely More Data / quote 4 of 5
Lack of expressivity in the linked data cloud
The LoD Cloud is of very shallow expressivity as a knowledge base and thus hardly allows to make use of underlying formal semantics through reasoning. The LoD Cloud primarily consists of ground level RDF triples, and hence does not utilize rich expres- sive features provided by OWL or RDF Schema. [...] Although DBpedia references Geonames using the owl:sameAs property, from the perspective of querying this makes it difficult as it might confuse the user as to which is the best source to answer the query. This problem gets even more compounded when contradictory facts are reported for the same entity by different datasets. For example, DBpedia quotes the population of Barcelona as 1,615,908, whereas according to Geonames it is 1,581,595. One can argue this might be because of difference in the notion of the city of Barcelona. But that leads to another interesting ques- tion: Is the owl:sameAs property misused in the LoD Cloud? This issue is partly related to Lack of expressiv- ity since there is no mechanism to perform verification of facts. Additionally, the LoD methodology prohibits reifi- cation of statements, thus disallowing assignment of con- text to statements