Withdrawing from PKGBook

After drafting a chapter for the Personal Knowledge Graphs book over the summer and getting some feedback in October, I withdrew my chapter from the book. Not that the book is not a good project, or my chapter is not a good chapter, but at the end of the day we are writing for different audiences about related but different things.

In brief, my chapter described a toolbox and the house it can be used to build. I showed my chapter to a few people and they like it not because it advances their understanding, but because (they feel) it would help newcomers to this space and provides "a manifesto for its development" (their words).

The book editors, on the other hand, are focused on a hammer (personal knowledge graphs) and are publishing a book about nails. Which is absolutely fine, but fitting my chapter into their book was always going to be a stretch: while one of the core tools in the toolkit is a thinking tool, PKGs & Linked Data are not really the most important factors in kick-starting the ecosystem. In the longer term, they will probably become more and more important as the ecosystem grows, with the growth of the ecosystem helping these technologies find a larger userbase.

So now I'm taking advantage of their (useful!) comments as I process my draft into a series of blog posts. Among other things, they'll be Stuff I Think tagged #myhub and #"collective intelligence".