Re: [JSON] Elephant in the room

Manu Sporny wrote:
> On 03/23/2011 12:22 PM, Nathan wrote:
>> Almost every developer I know, from enterprise to bedroom developers,
>> work primarily with OO oriented languages, or key/value data structures
>> in functional languages.
>>
>> The primary *huge* issue here, is that most people can't work with
>> triples and graphs without special tooling. Not to mention that it's
>> highly unfamiliar to them.
>>
>> Send an object with an id over the wire and people can use it, it's
>> familiar, they "get it", send them a triple, and they're lost - even if
>> they grok the graph and triple, they don't have the machinery to handle
>> it often.
>>
>> This is pretty much the sole reason that every developer I know outside
>> of the sem web community does not use RDF in any way, even though they
>> like the concepts and would like "linked data".
> 
> Yes, this is exactly it!
> 
> I think this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings that we are
> having in this group. Richard posted a good visualization:
> 
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=json,rdf&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
> 
> Fundamentally, until there is a free, open source, GPLed triple store
> that is performant, scales to billions of triples and provides an easy
> to use API - RDF and SPARQL are going to stay roughly as popular as they
> are right now. Until there is something to replace the 'M' in the LAMP
> stack for RDF applications, we're not going to see a change in the way
> Web developers develop.
> 
> For example, our company needs to store roughly 100 billion+ triples per
> year of financial transaction data. We're currently using a home-built
> MySQL solution for our storage mechanism, we will probably migrate to
> MongoDB in time. We have no free, open source choice for storing this
> information - nobody does. So the idea that the average web developer is
> backed by a triple store is a terrible assumption to make. The only
> thing that even remotely comes close to scaling for us is MongoDB and
> MongoDB speaks JSON (specifically, BSON).
> 
> When you have a triple store and SPARQL, you tend to see the world
> differently. Much of the world doesn't have a triple store, so they
> don't share the world view that roughly half of this working group shares.

It's more than just that though, where's the selection of triple/graph 
or prolog like languages for developers?

All this will take years to filter through, SPARQL is a shortcut where 
people can at least work with the results pretty easily.

Right at the core though, what's the difference between a set of triples 
attached to a subject, and an object with an id? RDF is the 
generalization, no reason on earth why people have to actually work with 
triples in the common case as far as I can tell. (certainly for non 
reasoning/inference type tasks).

Best,

Nathan

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 17:03:40 UTC