Bernard Vatant wrote:
Hi Dan, Kingsley
Happy to see you expose clearly those things that have been also in
the corner of my mind since Kingsley started to hammer the EAV drum a
while ago.
I've been also in training and introduction to RDF insisted on the
fact that RDF was somehow just an avatar of the old paradigm EAV or
however you name it, and I think it's a good way to introduce it, and
keep all the gory aspects for later on, and in particular the
syntactic mess (or should I say, joyful diversity).
But I follow Dan on the fact that the Linked Data cloud has flourished
on top of RDF-XML, at least as exchange and publication format. And I
must say that what I see daily with data providers and consumers
around Mondeca applications is data coming in and out in RDF-XML, for
better and worse indeed. And for what I see, it's easier to have data
providers now familiar with XML understand RDF through RDF-XML, by
making XML-friendly RDF. RDF-XML has not to be ugly and unreadable and
untractable, even if some tools have never care about that (no names).
And as the grease-monkey in charge of migrating miscellaneous data to
feed the semantic engine, I'm still quite happy with the current
CSV-to-plain-XML-to-RDF-XML (via XSLT, yes) route.
And I will give you the short feedback of our CTO in Mondeca after
reading the output of RDFNext workshop. "Well, no canonical XML
syntax?". Believe me, all the rest he did not even care mentioning.
Don't want to add to the "I wish I'd been there" but I would myself
exchange every other evolution and future work for a canonical RDF-XML
syntax. I know, I know, don't tell me.
Bernard
Bernard,
I hope my last response (with some corrections) makes my point clearer
re. booststrap i.e., broad adoption of Linked Data as expressed via the
evolution of the LOD cloud pictorial :-)
Ironically, I criticize RDF/XML a lot, but out sponger cartridges (basic
and meta) are major exploiters of RDF/XML re. what I see as its best
use: machine level transformations.
Kingsley
2010/7/1 Dan Brickley <dan...@danbri.org <mailto:dan...@danbri.org>>
(cc: list trimmed to LOD list.)
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Kingsley Idehen
<kide...@openlinksw.com <mailto:kide...@openlinksw.com>> wrote:
> Cut long story short.
[-cut-]
> We have an EAV graph model, URIs, 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.
I have trouble believing that last point, so hopefully I am
misunderstanding your point.
Linked data in the public Web was bootstrapped using standard RDF,
serialized primarily in RDF/XML, and initially deployed mostly by
virtue of people enthusiastically publishing 'FOAF files' in the
(RDF)Web. These files, for better or worse, were overwhelmingly in
RDF/XML.
When TimBL wrote http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html in
2006 he used what is retrospectively known as Notation 2, not its
successor Notation 3.
"Notation2"[*] was an unstriped XML syntax ( see original in
http://web.archive.org/web/20061115043657/http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
). That DesignIssues note was largely a response to the FOAF
deployment.
"This linking system was very successful, forming a growing social
network, and dominating, in 2006, the linked data available on the
web."
The LinkedData design note argued that (post RDFCore cleanup and
http-range discussions) we could now use URIs for non-Web things, and
that this would be easier than dealing with bNode-heavy data. Much of
the subsequent successes come from following that advice. Perhaps N3
played an educational role in showing that RDF had other
representations; but by then, SPARQL, NTriples etc were also around.
As was RDFa, http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/paper/58 ...
I have a hard time seeing N3 as the foundation that bootstrapped
things. Most of the substantial linked RDF in Web by 2006 was written
in RDF/XML, and by then the substantive issues around linking,
reference, aggregation, identification and linking etc were pretty
well understood. I don't dislike N3; it was a good technology testbed
and gave us the foundation for SPARQL's syntax, and for the Turtle
subset. But it's role outside our immediate community has been pretty
limited in my experience.
cheers,
Dan
[*] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Syntax.html
--
Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Vocabulary & Data Engineering
Tel: +33 (0) 971 488 459
Mail: bernard.vat...@mondeca.com <mailto:bernard.vat...@mondeca.com>
----------------------------------------------------
Mondeca
3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France
Web: http://www.mondeca.com
Blog: http://mondeca.wordpress.com
----------------------------------------------------
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
