Re: Show me the money - (was Subjects as Literals)

(cc: list trimmed to LOD list.)

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@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

Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 18:13:57 UTC