Re: Please publish Turtle or JSON-LD instead of RDF/XML [was Re: Recommendation for transformation of RDF/XML to JSON-LD in a web browser?]

On 3 September 2015 at 19:03, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:

> Side note: RDF/XML was the first RDF serialization standardized, over 15
> years ago, at a time when XML was all the buzz. Since then other
> serializations have been standardized that are far more human friendly to
> read and write, and easier for programmers to use, such as Turtle and
> JSON-LD.
>
> However, even beyond ease of use, one of the biggest problems with RDF/XML
> that I and others have seen over the years is that it misleads people into
> thinking that RDF is a dialect of XML, and it is not.  I'm sure this
> misconception was reinforced by the unfortunate depiction of XML in the
> foundation of the (now infamous) semantic web layer cake of 2001, which in
> hindsight is just plain wrong:
> http://www.w3.org/2001/09/06-ecdl/slide17-0.html
> (Admittedly JSON-LD may run a similar risk, but I think that risk is
> mitigated now by the fact that RDF is already more established in its own
> right.)
>
> I encourage all RDF publishers to use one of the other standard RDF
> formats such as Turtle or JSON-LD.  All commonly used RDF tools now support
> Turtle, and many or most already support JSON-LD.
>
> RDF/XML is not officially deprecated, but I personally hope that in the
> next round of RDF updates, we will quietly thank RDF/XML for its faithful
> service and mark it as deprecated.


Each serialization has pros and cons.

RDF/XML has probably the most tooling.

RDFa is nice for those used to working with HTML.

JSON LD is nice for those used to working with javascript.

Turtle is probably the most readable, can easily be embedded thru
nanotations, and has upgrade paths to N3 etc.

I think each choice will give you a different type of user base, and
different systems.  For me, turtle is the clear winner at this point in
time because it's the most "social" in terms of people using it to model
user, friends and connections.  Everyone has to make their bets, but if,
like me you think linked data would benefit from user integration, as web
1.0 did, then you may also want to make that bet on turtle.


>
>
> David Booth
>
>