Review of relevant technologies section of final report

All
 
I volunteered to review the Relevant technologies section of the final report,
on the basis that I had paid little attention to it and could look at it with
fresh eyes ;-)
 
What follows is a mix of nit-picking detail and general observations; it is all
meant to be constructive. In order of appearance:
 
"Fortunately, the principles of Linked Data are not tied to any particular tool
..." - This reads like an opinion; i.e. that this is fortunate.

"The following examples are not exhaustive ..." - examples of what? Tools?
Technologies?

"From a non-technical perspective, these technologies are relevant because they
support the creation and use of HTTP URIs that identify and describe discrete
and recognizable individuals." - 1. Is this true for all "these technologies"?
2. "HTTP URIs" is a technical term in a "non-technical perspective". 3. What are
"individuals"?

"The Semantic Web has been around many years ..." - would be useful to be
explict; how many years, roughly? Librarians may have a different pov of what
constitutes "many years".

"Linked Data http URIs are 'Cool' ..." - (and elsewhere) inconsistent
capitalization of "http/HTTP". Also inconsistent capitalization of "web/Web".

"... requests may be impractical for dataset with ..." - should be "datasets" or
"a dataset".

The link from "mash up" should be attached to its first mention, not second.

"... SKOS, which is an OWL ontology for dealing with a broad base of conceptual
schemes including the management of preferred and alternate labels." - "concept
schemes" is better, but most librarians would understand "controlled
terminologies and other concept schemes" best.

"As historically the emphasis on publishing information on the web has had to do
with publishing web pages, these technologies ..." - "Because web pages have
been the main way of publishing information on the web, these technologies ..."
might be clearer.

"It has noteably gained prominence ..." - remove "noteably" as it is superfluous
and possibly distracting. The rest of the paragraph, and the remainder of the
section could do with a rewrite to make it more succint and reduce the "opinion"
wording ("seems like it would", "does not appear to be the case", etc.)

"Modulo bugs in the search engines' parsers it is even possible to do both in
the same web page." - ???

"As the Web has grown in popularity ... around web technologies." - can be more
succintly stated as: "The software development community has created a variety
of software libraries, often referred to as web application frameworks, that
make it easier to create, maintain, and reuse web applications. They typically
implement the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, and encode and encourage best
practices
with respect to the REST Architectural Style and Resource Oriented
Architectures."

"However web developers are sometimes turned off ..." is opinion; this needs
rephrased.

"... serializing and sharing entity state in a database neutral way ..." - ???

"Most web developers however face a steep learning curve before being able to
exploit it, and for many application requirements this is too much of a burden."
- does this imply that the learning curve is a burden which prevents development
of appropriate services, or that many applications don't need such services?

"Web Services for the most common uses ..." - Not sure what this means.

"... custom-coded agents." - again, what does this mean?

"... form of an application programming interface (API)." - API is mentioned
earlier, without an acronym expansion - should be swapped around.

Generally, a lot of "opinion" statements seem to be made; direct factual
statements would be better.

Also, there is an awkward mix of lay explanation and technical terminology.
Library managers are unlikely to read it through or follow up links - they will
probably turn the whole section over to their technical staff to digest. Is the
section aimed at managers, technical staff, or both?
 
Cheers
 
Gordon