What is a good elevator pitch for Linked Data?

Jim Hendler had one of the best ones three years ago (http://swig.xmlhack.com/2007/11/30/2007-11-30.html) in which he was talking about the semantic web, but I use his elevator pitch on a slide when I'm defining Linked Data: "My document can point at your document on the Web, but my database can't point at something in your database without writing special purpose code. The SW aims at fixing that."

This may not be a direct answer to your question, but it has worked for me in the past when I talk about Linked Data to non-semantic web people.

http://www.slideshare.net/juansequeda/introduction-to-linked-data-2341398 slide 50

They: What is my incentive to publish Linked Data? Me: What was your incentive to publish an HTML page in 1990? They: ... Me: 1) to share data in documents and 2) because your neighbor was doing it They: ... Me: What is your incentive to publish Linked Data now? They: ... Me: 1) to share data as data and 2) because your neighbor is doing it (and now show the list of big shots that are publishing linked data)

This has worked for me. At least it is an eye opener!

I guess it really depends on the audience and what you want to "sell" them. But as a general short overview for people ranging from "mom" to tech-savy, I personally use a small example:

"Imagine you want to know who has ever worked on music used for a movie made by a member of the Coppola family. You find all the information freely on the web (IMDB, wikipedia, musicbrainz and others... you even have the link between the websites) but it will take you ages to build this list manually and to cross references from the various website. with semantic Web / linked data, it can be answered in no time"

It can be seen as an artificial example but I like it because people usually gets it (the complexity of the question, the fact that the data is there but not usable), it makes references to general cultures, and you can then find some other examples closer to the business domain of the audience. I sometimes got similar question that people wanted to answer based on their company data as an answer to this example...

I like the following statement best:

"Linked Data is the idea that the merger of a database produced by one provider and another database produced by a second provider has value much larger than that of the two separate databases." (courtesy of Eric Hellman)

The statement and subsequent discussions are available at http://groups.google.com/group/business-of-linked-data-bold/browse_thread/thread/897f8e80783c1f11#

The web allowed almost everyone to reach nearly every computer in the world to find any sort of information. People then used that ability to connect to each other as well.

Now, the semantic web allows almost any computer to reach almost all other computers for data about anything, and then combine it. This will allow the machines to answer pretty much any sort of question that you can think of, and plenty more that we can't think of yet.

Linking data allows you to focus on the core piece you really care about, while benefiting over time from enrichments made by others with different priorities and concerns. So it is appealing as a scoping strategy to those with limited resources who want nevertheless to keep their options open for the future.

Perhaps I publish a photo of a restaurant, with a food review on one site. Someone else publishes a wiki entry elsewhere noting that they have good wheelchair access and offer vegan options.

If these are linked (by homepage, phone number, whatever) then the photo is no longer just a photo of a restaurant; it becomes a photo of a vegan-friendly restaurant with wheelchair access. And the wiki entry is equally enriched. If the photo contained geo-tags (likely, as most digital cameras are phone-based these days), then both pieces of information are also linked to everything else we know about that place... independently managed fragments of information growing in value because we've linked them to form a network.

Ok that's too wordy for most elevator rides, and all the vegan/accessibility stuff might be too goody-goody for some red-blooded capitalists, but I think some story with this structure might work.

I very much agree with Ian, the point of an elevator pitch is to relay the key point(s) of the proposition to your audience in a memorable way and get them hooked, before they get off. At HPLB, our model was two floors ;)

I tell people that linked data is a low barriers-to-entry approach to publishing their data, getting it used by others and being able to use data from others to create applications of value. I tell them linked data creates value based on the same network principles as the current Web of Documents, using the same principles of identification and linking and the same protocols.

I tell them that linked data naturally extends the current web by bringing data into the mix, improving the performance of current infrastructure (such as search) but also creating valuable (and cool) new applications and capabilities!

The semantic web is project to make computers more human literate.

Just as today's web lets us focus on documents rather than computers and networks so the semantic web lets us focus on things, people, places and ideas; and because people tend to think about things and ideas (and not webpages) that brings us closer to a web built around how we think about the world. A web that is more useful and easier to use.

The more people use your data the more valuable your data becomes and everybody (including you, the publisher) benefit from this.

Information has intrinsic value which does depend on the data itself and does not change with the use of the data.

Linked Data is the best approach to maximize the extrinsic value of your data published on the Web and to leverage external contributions to improve the quality of your data itself (i.e. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", a.k.a. Linus's Law).

Linked Data allows the publisher to become and remain an "hub" between who provides the data and who consumes it.