Re: A look at WoT specs from Linked Data and AWWW perspective

I cannot speak to why the WoT WG has chosen JSON Schema vs anything else,
or whether that choice is likely to change.  JSON Schema is not in direct
competition with SHACL or SPARQL.

However, JSON Schema is under active development and investigating paths to
standardization through either the IETF or W3C, and we view the WoT WG as a
key use case for combining JSON Schema with JSON-LD and other semantic web
technologies.

JSON Schema is in the unusual situation of having become a de-facto
standard when the draft process stalled for several years.  Usually a
technology would be abandoned in such cases, but JSON Schema has proven to
have considerably more staying power.

As for reaching full standardization, I will note that picking up a widely
implemented and deployed proposed standard with several hundred open issues
and shepherding it to completion, including resolving the issues that
caused the original editors to abandon it, is not something that one can do
instantaneously, even if the IETF or W3C were willing to stamp things
as-is.  Which, quite rightly, they are not.

-henry


On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 1:18 PM, Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@atomgraph.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
> I can start by admitting that WoT is not my domain. But as a potential
> implementor of WoT data management systems, I have an interest in the W3C
> spec.
>
> Coming from the RDF/Linked Data world, I think there is a number of things
> that should be improved. Below is what I observed during the first reading.
>
>
> 5.2.1 Thing
> https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description/#classes
>
> "base" is not a domain vocabulary property, it is a feature of media types
> that support relative URIs, such as Turtle, JSON-LD etc., where @base is
> the syntax for it.
>
> The concept of "base URI" does not belong in the WoT domain nor its
> vocabulary, it is a matter of orthogonal specification(s).
>
>
> 5.2.3 Property
> https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description/#interactionpattern
>
> I wonder how can "writability" of any property on the web be a predefined
> constant? What happens if agents with different access rights are
> interacting with it -- is it not feasible that the writability should
> depend on the ACL, meaning it can change over time and depending on the
> request?
>
> Again, it looks like the WoT spec is trying to incorporate bits of
> orthogonal specifications, in case HTTP and probably W3C ACL.
>
> A property, like any Web resource, can be considered writable if an agent
> can perform PUT or DELETE on its URI and succeed (200 OK). Otherwise, 401
> or 403 should be returned. If the writability needs to be probed before
> making the actual request, HTTP OPTIONS can be used:
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.7
>
>
> 5.2.6 DataSchema
> https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description/#dataschema
>
> JSON Schema is referenced here, yet it is not a W3C standard, nor any kind
> of standard, as far as I know. Why is it considered safe to be used for
> formal definitions? Why not use an actual W3C standard such as SHACL or
> SPARQL? https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/
>
> JSON is only one of the syntaxes -- RDF is the model, and constraints
> should be based on it.
>
>
> Martynas Jusevicius
> atomgraph.com
>
>


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