Dan Brickley wrote:
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 11:35 PM, Kingsley Idehen <kide...@openlinksw.com> wrote:
The sequence went something like this.
TimBL Design Issues Note. and SPARQL emergence. Before that, RDF was
simply
in the dark ages.
It's only simple if you weren't there :)
You mean you didn't see me lurking in the dark? :-)
Humor aside, pre Linked Data meme, RDF just wasn't making any tangible
progress (adoption or comprehension wise) beyond the inner sanctums of the
Semantic Web community, you know what I mean when I say that, right?
And all I'm saying is that it took a lot of work from a lot of people
(most of whom are on these lists) to get to that stage where it was
capable of breaking out. The state of RDF deployment, tooling,
concepts, specs and community in 2006 was a significant improvement on
what we had in, say 1999. The Linked Data push was a breakthrough, but
it didn't happen in a vacuum or overnight; neither did SPARQL...
Dan,
Of course a lot of people have put a lot of effort into RDF. I don't
think I am refuting or in anyway seeking to undermine that obvious fact.
When I express concerns about RDF (model and representation conflation)
it typically gets translated into: I don't like RDF or I have a problem
with RDF.
When outline the path to a breakthrough it gets translated to: SPARQL
and Linked Data dropping out of the sky etc..
IMHO. A lot of people who put a lot of hard work into RDF still don't
seem to look back at why it took until 2006-2007 for an eventual
breakthrough, seriously.
What is the unambiguous definition of RDF?
Which one of these definitions is gospel?
1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-primer-20040210/ -- The Resource
Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information
about resources in the World Wide Web.
2. http://www.w3.org/RDF/ -- RDF is a standard model for data
interchange on the Web.
#1 infers Markup
#2 infers Model
While in reality its supposed to be a framework for describing Things
based on a ??? graph model.
I would really like us to collectively focus on not repeating mistakes
from the past as we move forward. We've all put lots of energy,
knowledge, and hard cash into this journey.
Linked Data remains a pragmatic reflection of getting RDF distractions
out of the way en route to effectively demonstrating vital evolution of
the Web IMHO.
A green page may not maketh a standard but it darn well created kinetic
energy from potential energy :-)
cheers,
Dan
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
