Re: RDFa API - graph?

Shane McCarron wrote:
> +1.
> 
> however, playing devil's advocate for a moment... the problem with 
> 'graph' is that people who don't grok RDF (like me) surely won't grok 
> what a 'graph' is.  'graph' is a very computer-sciency term.  It's the 
> right term in this case.  The problem is that as our audience expands 
> beyond computer scientists to web designers who just want to easily 
> access semantic information from a web page... those people are not in 
> general classically trained CSci majors like some of us surely are.  I 

Agree but they already have to deal with triples, subject, predicate, 
object, plain literals, typed literals and so forth. So saying that a 
graph is a set of triples - or even an array of all the triples in the 
document, should be a relatively easy learning curve, and more to the 
point keeps things consistent across all the docs they could read. Users 
who don't care won't care, but for those who do want to learn more we 
should make the path as easy and consistent as possible.

</gets-off-soap-box>

> still think this is the right term.  But a glossary or short definition 
> of the term might help the great unwashed out there.

agreed - definitely!

Best,

Nathan

> On 10/30/2010 10:18 AM, Arto Bendiken wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Nathan<nathan@webr3.org>  wrote:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> Just a small thought.. it dawned on me this morning that Graph or 
>>> RDFGraph
>>> may be a better / alternative name for DataStore - personally when I
>>> mentally swap out all mentions of store for graph in examples, design 
>>> and
>>> text things feel that bit clearer
>>>
>>>   graph.add(triple);
>>>   graph.merge(otherGraph);
>>>   document.data.graph;
>>>   serialize(graph);
>>>   graph.filter(myFilter);
>>>
>>> and so forth, it clearly separates the concepts of "Store" (somewhere to
>>> store graphs and triples) and "Graph" (a set of triples, an RDF Graph),
>>> further, graph is a common concept in the RDFa Core documentation, 
>>> and all
>>> RDF documentation which goes unrepresented in the RDFa API.
>>>
>>> Anyway, just a thought, I'm sure you get the idea - any opinions?
>> +1 for this. In RDF.rb [1], we have repositories and graphs, where
>> repositories contain one or more graphs, and those graphs then contain
>> a set of triples each. So, I'd have to agree that "Graph" is a better
>> name than "DataStore" for a container of triples.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Arto
>>
>> [1] http://rdf.rubyforge.org/
>>
>

Received on Saturday, 30 October 2010 17:53:24 UTC