Re: lack of clear motivation for transforming from CSV to JSON or XML

I would further argue that it is impossible to define a mapping for 
every format. Why would we stop to "CSV to JSON" and "CSV to XML"?

On 03/12/2014 05:15 PM, Alfredo Serafini wrote:
> Hi what about adopting json-d for this?
> I mean: json-ld can be seen as a good compromise because it offers a 
> "natural" RDF conversion, while it is actually  a specific JSON 
> dialect. As it is almost impossible to provide mapping for every kind 
> of json dialect (and CSV formats too!), the usage of a specific json 
> syntax as a reference might simplify things, and json-ld already 
> embeds RDF logic.
>
>
> Alfredo
>
> There is a clear requirement to transform from CSV to RDF 
> <http://w3c.github.io/csvw/use-cases-and-requirements/#R-CsvToRdfTransformation> 
> – which implies that is should be possible to convert CSV to one or 
> more of the RDF encodings (incl. TTL, RDF/XML and JSON-LD) …
>
> But there’s a risk that this RDF-centric approach misses a concern 
> simply about, say, converting CSV to simple JSON.
>
The difference with RDF (and any of its encodings) is that we don't 
purely "convert" to another format just because there are different 
reasons that one might prefer to use the data in this format. It is that 
we enrich the data; we "map" them to their metadata providing 
additionally their meaning. In order to do that we need another 
structure (thus different format/serialisation). Those annotation are 
given because we expect that the manipulation of the data (not only in 
RDF but in other formats too) would be facilitated, as we know then the 
context of the data.
Why "CSV to RDF to JSON-LD" or "CSV-LD (to RDF) to JSON-LD" (and in 
general CSV to RDF to any_format), would not be sufficient if it is 
needed to do so?

Kind regards,
Anastasia
-- 

Anastasia Dimou
@natadimou | mmlab.be | iminds.be
Semantic Web - Linked Open Data Researcher
Ghent University, Belgium - Multimedia Lab - iMinds
Gaston Crommenlaan 8 bus 201, B-9050 Ledeberg-Ghent, Belgium