Re: Hydra RDF

Hi all,

Phil Archer asked me for a brief reply to this thread (which has so far
slipped under my radar). I'm am the creator of Hydra and the chair of the
Hydra W3C Community Group. Furthermore, I am one of the core designers of
JSON-LD and co-edited the RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax
specification.

Hydra's goal is to simplify the creation of truly RESTful, hypermedia-driven
Web APIs. All APIs created with Hydra are accessible by completely generic
tools instead of requiring specialized libraries or SDKs. There exists a
proof of concept which is called the HydraConsole on my homepage [1] which
illustrates this nicely (I hope).


On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 23:16:50 -0300, Augusto Herrmann wrote:
> I see this as a similar effort to HAL, but Hydra seems more advanced and
in
> tune with linked data (as it uses JSON-LD). Both of them have a draft
> specification for JSON types only. There's also Subbu Alamaraju's O'Reilly
> book, which offers yet another proposal for linking JSON and also XML
> resources in a RESTful API.

While HAL concentrates on adding links to JSON, Hydra goes far further and
also tries to make the messages self-descriptive. Indeed, it tries to bridge
the gap between RESTful services and Linked Data.

Hydra has certainly be created with "JSON(-LD) developers" in mind.
Nevertheless, it is an ordinary RDF vocabulary in the end. As such, you can
obviously also use it with Turtle, RDF/XML (if you *really* want), and any
other RDF serialization format.


> IMHO, all these efforts and communities of developers and researchers
> should be merged within the w3c to try and produce a single specification
> for linking data resources in common open formats (json, xls, csv) on the
> web.

The goal of the Hydra Community Group [2] is certainly to develop a
standard. We welcome everyone who is interested in this space to join our
group. Despite still being quite young, the group has grown to over 60
members. There's steadily growing interest from developers, companies, and
academia. At least one startup is currently implementing their complete Web
API using JSON-LD and Hydra.

Please let me know if there are any questions or if there's anything else I
can do to help (I've heard Hydra is in-scope for the best practices
document).


Thanks,
Markus


P.S.: I wasn't sure whether my post to public-dwbp-wg@w3.org goes through so
I cc'ed public-dwbp-comments@w3.org.


[1] http://www.markus-lanthaler.com/hydra/
[2] http://www.w3.org/community/hydra/


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Monday, 14 April 2014 19:04:24 UTC