I'm getting a bit further along in trying to understand how the pieces are supposed to fit together. I don't have immediate answers but I've found one particular use case that I think is a big win for linked data. If I can assemble a useful working implementation I'll write about it here.

In the meantime, I keep stumbling over the following sticking points. I'm searching for answers (even for the ones not framed as questions), and would gladly take any advice or suggestions.

• I love the *idea* of linked data but I'm not sure I can buy into the current state of the art [1] in how to best link data. In particular, it seems like "sameAs" claims should be jumping off points for human judgement, rather than being presumed to be automated declarations of equivalence. Let's automate bridging the human judgement pieces... that'd be interesting.
• I have never understood FOAF. It seems like a fine way to serialize a cult-of-personality network (e.g. "see? i'm only two steps from timbl himself!!") Similarly I don't get the whole "social graph" buzz either. I'm not a marketer looking to harvest customer data. I'm not doing any affinity indexing just now. What other use is there for saying who my friends are, besides those two?
• Does the linked data movement really depend upon RDF? It doesn't seem like it has to. Maybe it could grow faster if it didn't.
• The info resource / non-info resource [2] dichotomy doesn't fit my brain. (Wherein everything is always a representation, and sometimes I can only share description, but that description is as important as any other representation, because surrogation is really important too.) It's been pointed out to me that this is still controversial. I can understand why.
• If blank nodes are bad [3] (end of the section), how do I represent sets of literals that mean the same thing but are expressed in different languages? I need to do that right now and I can't figure out how without blank nodes.
• I'm still mainly interested in Description (talking about things) and am completely disinterested in modeling knowledge (what things are and mean) and seem to keep finding examples where arguments about best practices hinge on notions of essential truths ("is it a resource that can be dereferenced on the web? a dog is not, so it's a non-information resource") that simply never matter in the work I do (I'm a librarian and I want to improve ways to organize and provide access to stuff). I care about systems that help people come to their own judgements about what things are and what they mean, and in particular I care about systems that allow a wide range of people to come to a wide range of these judgements. If I have to start a system about things that aren't on the web by accepting truth-based categorizations about web availability, I'm shoehorning my system into an oddly-structured container from day zero. I think I don't want to do that. Granted, we've had to do that for centuries in libraries (see Books, Oversized, or the "basement full of gifts the President received while in office" in any presidential library/archives for good examples), but we make do for weird examples and still put "most stuff" in "standard, appropriate containers" (e.g. ordinary shelves and file boxes), rather than building whole systems around odd catch-all structures (basements full of stuff).
• er, that last one was over-long, so I'll try it this way instead. I think I'm interested in Linked Description, not Linked Data.

A colleague I trust and always learn from tells me that I should stop saying snarky-seeming things like the above in private channels and should instead say them publicly. It's weird - when some friends and correspondents hear me going on like I do in this post, they seem to presume that I'm saying I hate the semantic web or am bad-mouthing RDF. I don't intend to do either of those things. I'm seriously just trying to understand their place and whether they can help me and my colleagues in the work we're dong. After ten years of keeping an eye on them, and having real problems in front of us to solve right now, I need to know whether this path is going to help me right now. It seems to have a lot of potential, but I don't see many public examples of current implementations that solve real problems for people. I've read about a few private ones that do sound promising, but I can't see them for myself, so I have to dismiss them. There are cool linked data sites that offer up good data, but I haven't found many that really require the RDF/OWL/etc. flavor they're offering (i.e. they could just offer up their data in other formats and might be just as effective for data linking over time).

So I'm not trying to be dismissive or insulting, though I admit that sometimes I just am, and jerkily so. I'm trying to avoid that now by posting more thoughtfully here. I still need help understanding why my thinking might be wrong on the issues I listed above, but if the helpers take a defensive stand without backing up claims with working sites, I'm going to keep questioning the state-of-the-received wisdom. Please don't take it personally.