Re: Understanding of JSON-LD values

On Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:28:28 +1000, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter@gmail.com> said:

    > advantage if all users send documents in a particular profile of
    > JSON-LD, (and they must reference a particular @context in the
    > case of Web Payments), which will encourage the current
    > inefficient practice of creating data serialisations to match
    > specific APIs rather than programming for reuse and longevity
    > using only the RDF Abstract Model.

As I understand it, that's the point. JSON APIs work well because they
don't generalise. That makes them easy to use, and that's why people
use them. JSON-LD is supposed to give us a consistent way to interpret
these documents as RDF if we're interested in abstract longevity --
without imposing any extra drag on the normal web developers who just
want to use simple dictionaries in a simple context.

Now if we can do that, we have the best of both worlds. I can write a
little server API that does something, without worrying or thinking at
all about how it fits into the bigger picture. People can use my
service without having to get special tools. Then you can make a
profile with instructions for how you think it should fit in and use
specialised tools to work at the next level up. 

I disagree with the strong de-emphasis on RDF in the JSON-LD
specifications though. It should say something more like, "if you use
JSON this way, it makes it possible to do all sorts of RDF semantic
web stuff with it, in fact it *is* RDF -- that's pretty cool, but if
you don't want to think about that, you don't have to".

-w

Received on Thursday, 13 June 2013 10:01:02 UTC