The term “vulgar linked data” comes from a 2022 article/blog post, Decentralized Infrastructure for (Neuro)science Or, Kill the Cloud in Your Mind by Jonny L. Saunders. It doesn’t seem to have caught on, but I think the idea behind it is worth engaging with critically.

This post aims to provide a high-level overview of some of the ways in which falsehoods can be created and obscured within ontologies, and how sometimes things that can be evidenced cannot be represented within them. My aim is to demonstrate that ontologies are a lossy format, and that there are specific things we can say that we lose when we use them.