RE: ISSUE-66: LinkedDataT

On 5 Aug 2014 at 14:20, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>>> I'd dare to say that the majority of people do assume
>>> that Linked Data is just done with RDF.
>> 
>> That's obviously true for the Semantic Web community. Not so true
>> for the rest of the world :-)
> 
> I thought the only people who cared about Linked Data
> were those in the Semantic Web community. My bad!
> 
> Any examples of non-RDF Linked Data in the wild?

There's a lot of buzz around Hypermedia APIs at the moment. Some people
describe this as Linked APIs or also Linked Data without thinking about RDF
for a second.


>>> So to what extent is it then necessary to clarify this?
>> 
>> I think it is very important as our group is not a homogenous
>> group of Semantic Web experts.
> 
> Still not fully convinced there are people
> who don't think of "RDF" when hearing "Linked Data".
> Could you point me to examples?

I have been at lots of developer conferences in the last couple of months.
Very few people there have any Semantic Web background. Nevertheless they
use terms like "linked data" to talk about data that contains hyperlinks.


>>> What do you think about the current introduction
>>> to the triple pattern fragments spec [1]?
>> 
>> It's quite nice but I think it could be further improved, especially for
>> people without a lot of SemWeb background.
> 
> Any suggestions?

I think the proposal further down would be a first step.


>>>    By publishing Linked Data [LINKED-DATA],
>>>    we enable automated clients to consume information.
>> 
>> Hmm... automated clients such as Google are quite happy consuming plain
old
>> HTML... I know what you are trying to say but people who haven't spent a
>> whole lot of time on this won't understand it, I think.
> 
> Instead of "consume":
> - "understand" (not the right word)
> - "interpret" (what does that mean)
> - . ?
> 
> "interpret" might be best!

If it doesn't add anything, just leave it out.


>> Maybe it would be more straightforward to explain it the other way round:
>>  - documents are in natural language
>>  - machines are bad in understanding natural language
>>  - machines prefer structured data using unambiguous identifiers
>>  - the Web uses URLs* as identifiers
>>  - RDF allows data to be expressed in a machine-processable way by
>>    leveraging URLs
>>  (- RDF expresses data in the form of triples) -- could be omitted
>>  - RDF can be serialized in various formats such as JSON-LD, HTML+RDFa,
or
>>    Turtle
>
> I suppose I could rewrite it like that, yes!

Do others think this clarifies things?


>> I would also suggest to use a different term than "Linked Data document".
Is
>> it actually needed or could we also get rid of this concept?
> 
> I used to call them colloquially "subject pages";
> I think it was Olaf who recommended me "Linked Data document".
> 
> Any term that's more clear is good for me.

What about "RDF representations"? Swapping section 4.1 and 4.2 might make
this simpler as you could simply say that a (RDF) "data dump" is the union
of all RDF "representations" of a dataset/API/whatever.


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2014 12:39:48 UTC