Re: Social data /syntax/ vs Social data /vocabulary/

On 21 Sep 2014, at 19:24, Erik Wilde <dret@berkeley.edu> wrote:

> what about:
> 
> On 2014-09-21, 9:00, ☮ elf Pavlik ☮ wrote:
>>>> Now, there is an open question of should we be defining a /syntax/ or a
>>>> /vocabulary*/?
> 
> we need both.
> 
> - a vocabulary is the set of concepts that are meaningful for the relevant domain. you can define a vocabulary in some existing metamodel framework, or do it ad hoc. both choices have good and bad side-effects.
> 
> - a syntax is a representation that has well-defined rules how to serialize a vocabulary instance into the representation, and how to parse a representation into the domain model. without a syntax, you cannot have protocols or other ways of exchanging data.


yes. A very important movement in Logic in the past 20 years has been the disovery that once 
one settles the vocabulary and its semantics one can create a very large family of syntaxes
that use that vocabulary to express the same proposition. It is on this movement that RDF (W3C) and 
Common Logic (ISO) came to be.

So as it happens, once one has the vocabulary one can just choose one of the applicable syntaxes for
purposes of exchange of data.

> 
>> Could we try clarify this distinction between /syntax/ and /vocabulary/
>> before tuesday call?
> 
> is the above distinction clear enough? for AS1, it was pretty clear:
> 
> - the vocabulary was in an ad hoc metamodel, and thus there was little baggage (but also little out-of-the-box support) associated with it.
> 
> - the syntaxes were JSON and Atom, and for both syntaxes it was defined how the vocabulary model maps to the syntax model.

The point is that now we have JSON-LD the syntax for JSON has allready been agreed upon and is widely adopted.
All that remains to be agreed upon is the vocabulary for the use cases we want to solve. Then the work is done. 
There is not an additional job to determine the syntax.

This removes a huge burden on development of a convention, which is great, because there is a lot to do.


> 
> cheers,
> 
> dret.
> 
> -- 
> erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
>           | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
>           | http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Sunday, 21 September 2014 19:03:57 UTC