Re: WebID vs. JSON (Was: Re: Think before you write Semantic Web crawlers)

On Wed, 2011-06-22 at 15:52 +0100, 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?

+1

Don't raise barriers to linked data use/publication by tying it to
widespread adoption and support for WebID.

Dave

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 15:09:12 UTC