Nathan wrote:
Dan, Jeremy, Pat, Henry, Michael, Kinglsey, Ivan, ack.. everyone,
Part of me feels like I should apologise for bringing this to the
mailing list (even though it was inevitable) - this is all getting out
of scope and the last thing we need is one of the most critical
communities in what's a mini revolution to be split over such matters.
Valid arguments from all sides, technical and not - but things are
really getting conflated here, at least from what I originally
intended to put forward (probably past that and insignificant now).
I respect that everybody has made large investments, time, money,
data, deployment, training and so forth; but really, non of that need
be wasted and nobody need change anything that has any impact on any
investments thus far.
My (personal) concern is really on the 10 year timeline (a bit shorter
to be honest ;), there are limitations and things in RDF that do,
100%, prevent the web of data as a whole from moving forwards -
however, nobody has to scrap anything.
Simply, define a non serialization specific model that caters for N3
and RDF - then let each standard or serialization specify what it
implements/supports - the point here, and I stress, isn't to break
anything, but to open it up to innovation and allow the next decades
worth of hacking to get going
So RDF/XML is perhaps broken technically and doesn't support all these
things, who cares? it obviously works just fine for a deployment of
several billion triples, why change it? why not define it as a subset
of some core model? - I can only see one reason not to, and I hate to
say it, but some kind of pride that the work done thus far and
commonly adopted *must* be seen to be 'perfect' - please, don't take
that as any insult, as none is intended.
There are clearly very strong opinions on both sides, and very valid
reasons too - there's an easy solution that would keep everybody happy
and allow all to get on being productive and innovative - why not
enable this?
In all honesty, if this doesn't happen, I personally will have no
choice but to move to N3 for the bulk of things, and hope for other
serializations of N3 to come along - I'd do that today, but you see
I'm a huge linked data proponent and see almost unquantifiable gains
from adopting linked data - but if what I do to get a full working
model of the web of data doesn't qualify as valid RDF at some level
and you all can't utilize it, then it's a wasted effort and a road to
no where - this, is the real issue, and many others have hit it, and
will hit it again and again as time moves on.
Please, do consider, nobody need loose anything here
Best,
Nathan
- :(
Jeremy Carroll wrote:
I am still not hearing any argument to justify the costs of literals
as subjects
I have loads and loads of code, both open source and commercial that
assumes throughout that a node in a subject position is not a
literal, and a node in a predicate position is a URI node.
Of course, the "correct" thing to do is to allow all three node types
in all three positions. (Well four if we take the graph name as well!)
But if we make a change, all of my code base will need to be checked
for this issue.
This costs my company maybe $100K (very roughly)
No one has even showed me $1K of advantage for this change.
It is a no brainer not to do the fix even if it is technically correct
Jeremy
Cut long story short.
RDF/XML != RDF.
Trouble is this though:
World sees RDF/XML == RDF. They don't see RDF Data Model aspect.
W3C only officially acknowledges RDF/XML as Markup Language for RDF Data
Model.
Even worse, RDF (perceived to be == RDF/XML) is now tagged as mandatory
for Linked Data, which is simply not so at all.
We have an EAV model, URIs, quads (or triples) and a variety of data
representation mechanisms. N3 is one of those, and its basically the
foundation that bootstrapped the House of HTTP based Linked Data.
RDF modulo Linked Data has nothing to show bar the kind to discussion
thread you might have inadvertently triggered. Which is why I find RDF
and Linked Data conflation an unfortunate attempt to force RDF (and all
its troubles) on the truly useful outputs from the Semantic Web Project.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
