- From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:03:42 +0100
- To: public-lod@w3.org
On 6/22/11 3:52 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote: > Hi, > > On 22 June 2011 15:41, William Waites<ww@styx.org> wrote: >> What does WebID have to do with JSON? They're somehow representative >> of two competing trends. >> >> The RDF/JSON, JSON-LD, etc. work is supposed to be about making it >> easier to work with RDF for your average programmer, to remove the >> need for complex parsers, etc. and generally to lower the barriers. >> >> The WebID arrangement is about raising barriers. Not intended to be >> the same kind of barriers, certainly the intent isn't to make >> programmer's lives more difficult, rather to provide a good way to do >> distributed authentication without falling into the traps of PKI and >> such. >> >> While I like WebID, and I think it is very elegant, the fact is that I >> can use just about any HTTP client to retrieve a document whereas to >> get rdf processing clients, agents, whatever, to do it will require >> quite a lot of work [1]. This is one reason why, for example, 4store's >> arrangement of /sparql/ for read operations and /data/ and /update/ >> for write operations is *so* much easier to work with than Virtuoso's >> OAuth and WebID arrangement - I can just restrict access using all of >> the normal tools like apache, nginx, squid, etc.. >> >> So in the end we have some work being done to address the perception >> that RDF is difficult to work with and on the other hand a suggestion >> of widespread putting in place of authentication infrastructure which, >> whilst obviously filling a need, stands to make working with the data >> behind it more difficult. >> >> How do we balance these two tendencies? > By recognising that often we just need to use existing technologies > more effectively and more widely, rather than throw more technology at > a problem, thereby creating an even greater education and adoption > problem? WebID is existing technology. It essence is: 1. URI based Names 2. URL based Data Access Addresses 3. Graph based Data Representation 4. Data Access Logic for determining Who can do what from what Address. We are dogfooding the very technology we want people to use. We are applying it to a serious and unavoidable problem. > Cheers, > > L. > -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen President& CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 15:04:22 UTC