Re: Welcome to the community group on Bridging GraphQL and RDF

Thanks for putting this together, Ruben!

I’ve been developer and a software architect for a few decades.  Recently, I’ve been called a Semantic Architect but I see myself as an enabler - capable of working with everyone to get a high value knowledge graph off the ground.  However, that has been hard - often because developers don’t really want to learn the classic semantic tech stack.  And who can blame them - it’s a tiny part of what they’ll use from day to day, requires a long journey on the learning curve, and is decidedly not cool. 

I come to this community group from that place.  No matter what I think about GraphQL it has traction, is growing, and has a sheen rather than a stink. Further, I’m aware that very smart people have advocated its mapping to RDF (Ruben, Holger, and others).  That’s enough for me to be involved.

Adam Kimball


> On Feb 13, 2020, at 8:14 AM, Ruben Taelman <ruben.taelman@ugent.be> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> Welcome to the community group on Bridging GraphQL and RDF!
> 
> As you probably already know,
> this group has been setup to explore combinations of GraphQL and RDF,
> and to investigate how these two domains can help each other.
> 
> Before we start with defining the concrete goals of this group,
> selecting a chair, and defining the process that will be followed,
> I suggest that everyone first introduces themselves,
> and shares with the group what you would like to see as an outcome.
> 
> Let me start off:
> 
> I am a (finishing) PhD student at Ghent University, Belgium.
> My research focuses on publishing and querying Linked Data on the Web.
> 
> During my research, I have experienced the difficulty developers have with writing SPARQL queries.
> Since GraphQL is much more popular among developers, I tried to lift GraphQL queries to the RDF domain,
> so that they can be used as an alternative to SPARQL queries.
> This mechanism resulted in GraphQL-LD [1, 2], which combines GraphQL queries with JSON-LD contexts.
> 
> During my work on GraphQL-LD, I quickly noticed that several other companies had similar ideas.
> Last year, I started working on a high-level comparison [3, 4] between the approaches that existed back then.
> Note that several new related approaches have been introduced, so my comparison is a bit outdated.
> As several people (including myself) recognised the need for some kind of alignment between these different approaches,
> I created this community group as an attempt to bring all interested parties together.
> 
> As an end-goal (possibly as a step *after* this CG),
> I would like to see some kind of standardization on how GraphQL maps to RDF.
> Given my interest in querying, I would at least like to see this from a querying perspective,
> so I want some kind of mapping from GraphQL queries to SPARQL queries (or something more generic).
> I understand that other people in this group are interested in other (non-querying) aspects of GraphQL,
> and I definitely agree that work should be done for these things as well.
> 
> [1] https://comunica.github.io/Article-ISWC2018-Demo-GraphQlLD/ <https://comunica.github.io/Article-ISWC2018-Demo-GraphQlLD/>
> [2] https://github.com/rubensworks/graphql-ld.js <https://github.com/rubensworks/graphql-ld.js>
> [3] https://rubensworks.github.io/article-w3cdataws2019-graphql/ <https://rubensworks.github.io/article-w3cdataws2019-graphql/>
> [4] https://www.rubensworks.net/raw/slides/2019/w3c-data-ws-graphql-rdf/ <https://www.rubensworks.net/raw/slides/2019/w3c-data-ws-graphql-rdf/>
> Kind regards,
> Ruben Taelman