Re: [JSON] Elephant in the room

* Peter Frederick Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> [2011-03-23 13:00-0400]
> From: Nathan <nathan@webr3.org>
> Subject: [JSON] Elephant in the room
> Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:22:10 -0500
> 
> > 
> > Just wanted to capture something I don't think I've conveyed until now:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Although I sympathize with the sentiments here, the reasoning doesn't
> seem right to me.
> 
> After all, the native data structures in the programming languages that
> most people use are not trees, but instead form ... [wait for it]
> ... arbitrary graphs.  Of course, in strict functional langauges trees
> are native, not graphs, but most developers don't use strict functional
> languages.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Hmm.   What about relational and object-oriented data bases?  These
> handle generalizations of graphs and triples.  As well, relational data
> bases often separate the parts of what one might think of as an object.
> 
> > 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".
> 
> I don't think that this is the reason.  
> 
> My speculation is that the disconnect is in a different place, namely
> the difference between the open data model of RDF and the closed data
> model of many object-oriented languages (or, maybe, of many
> object-oriented minds).

Trying to think narrowly about just the production and consumption of
JSON, I think agree with PFPS. While folks are used to working with
objects, and being able to call methods and that sort of thing, JSON
marshalling throws that away and just records/restores the constituent
properties, much as you would when marshalling to RDF. ASP.NET tries
to instill some higher-level marshalling protocol to give you objects,
but I don't think that's what Joe Javascript has come to expect from
his JSON.  And if he has, we can probably impose the same coding
disciplines.


> Another related potential disconnect is that the RDF triples that one might
> think of as constituting an RDF object don't need to be contiguous in an
> RDF document, whereas people tend to think of an object and its
> properties as one unit.  Of course, RDF/XML contains an attempt to
> regain this continuity, and RDF/XML doesn't seem to be part of the
> solution, so maybe this disconnect isn't so important.
> 
> > Best,
> > 
> > Nathan
> 
> peter
> 

-- 
-ericP

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 17:17:33 UTC