Rob Styles wrote:
On 1 Jul 2010, at 14:05, Ed Summers wrote:
Wonderful post Dan. I think the work you and others have been doing w/
Facebook on the OpenGraphProtocol is a great example of how we ought
to be thinking about the future of RDF ... building vocabularies to
describe web resources, describing relationships between these
resources...basically embracing the web that we have...just like Edd
did with XTech.
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Dan Brickley <[email protected]> wrote:
The very nature of RDF makes it somewhat annoying to work with. RDF
data is always going to be a kind of frankenstein's data monster,
patched together from bits and pieces that can just about be made to
fit together. Fortunately, we have at our fingertips a world wide Web
that lets us share an awful lot of these bits; the more we can get
re-usable RDF datasets out there, the less people will worry about the
pain of using it, and the more likely it'll be that there will be
genuinely useful, relevant data on hand when someone goes looking for
it.
I find the hardest thing to get newbies (like myself not too long ago)
to understand is that when one consumes RDF (in whatever
serialization) you need to operate on it like a graph instead of as a
hierarchical document (xml, json). I guess this is where SPARQL comes
in, but if you have to get a SPARQL stack set up to just work with
some data you fetched from a URI ...
Absolutely! In my experience training people on this stuff this is exactly the
sticking point, everyone is used to navigating trees, not graphs and without
understanding the graph data model rdf serialisations are opaque.
rob
I was pleased to see a JSON Serialization for RDF make it into the top
5 improvements [1]. I think a canonical, idiomatic JSON representation
for RDF would simplify processing of RDF data on the web. Like RDFa,
it would encourage the use of the RDF data model for describing little
bits of the Giant Global Graph we call the World Wide Web.
//Ed
[1] http://www.w3.org/2010/06/rdf-work-items/table
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Rob,
+1
Which is why I find aversion to EAV or EAV/CR when introducing RDF
utterly bizarre.
RDF didn't invent the Graph Model. It simply added URIs as an evolution
of an established model.
RDF will remain in a comprehension tizzy for as long as people attempt
to introduce it to newcomers without historic perspective.
History helps anyone grok new subject matter.
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Kingsley Idehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software
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Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
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