On 6/11/11 8:20 PM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
Look, Alan. I've wasted eight years arguing about that shit and defending
httpRange-14, and I'm sick and tired of it. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook,
Freebase and the New York Times are violating httpRange-14. I consider that
battle lost. I recanted. I've come to embrace agnosticism and I am not planning
to waste any more time discussing these issues.
Editor redo:
Richard,
The battle isn't lost. The basic lesson is this, less talk and more
walk. To date httpRange-14 has been a clump of gobbledygook to most.
This is why I've always raised concerns with both the RDF and Linked
Data narratives.
RDF *supporters* seek to push it as the sole option for Linked Data
which is a brutal fallacy, diabolical marketing, and the cruelest of
obstructions to insert into Linked Data's momentum.
Linked Data is about a time *tested* computing practice re., "data
access by reference". There are a vast number of programmers outside the
W3C that understand de-reference (indirection) and address-of
operations. These basic operations are utterly lost in the httpRange-14
narrative because it opted to carve out an island from the broader
continent that is computer science. Computer science preceded the
ubiquitous WWW.
Using Links as espoused by TimBL's Linked Data meme is an innovation
that has its origins in the age-old computing realm of "data access by
reference". The difference is that we are using this old concept at
InterWeb scale via hyperlinks. The day we tweak the narrative is the day
the confusion starts to dissipate. Disambiguating de-reference
(indirection) and address-of operations via a HTTP messaging heuristic
such that Objects are endowed with Names is a no-brainer, but only when
the concept is understood. Thus, as stated in my earlier post, we have
to make solutions that demonstrate the underlying power of this old
concept that's now available to end-users, power-users, integrators, and
developers via hyperlinks.
Let's keep on educating, but via solutions that make value palpable.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
