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

Hi all,

my name is Angelo Veltens and I am working as a Web Developer and IT
Consultant in Germany. During my studies I was enganged in Linked Data
and kept an interest beyond that. Currently I am active in the Solid
Community.

In my day job most people are not aware of Semantic Web technologies or
"heared of such at university" and consider it ancient / unpractical.

GraphQL got quite some attention among colleagues and customers. I think
mainly because of a very good tooling and developer experience. It's
easy to build an API going a clear, well documented path. This of course
comes with down-sides, which seam not to be considered very well
compared to the short-term gains.

Nevertheless in practice there are many use cases that do not require a
complex stack like SemWeb and that is where GraphQL comes in handy. I
think it's crucial to make technology easily available to developers. In
the end we are all human, take the easy path and have no time to dive
into scientific groundwork. So the latter has to be build into the tools
at hand by default. I imagine a tech that is as easy in day-to-day use
as GraphQL and at the same time does not block the path to going more
complex as soon as actually needed.

Kind regards
Angelo

Am 13.02.20 um 16:14 schrieb Ruben Taelman:
> 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/
> [2] https://github.com/rubensworks/graphql-ld.js
> [3] https://rubensworks.github.io/article-w3cdataws2019-graphql/
> [4] https://www.rubensworks.net/raw/slides/2019/w3c-data-ws-graphql-rdf/
>
> Kind regards,
> Ruben Taelman