Hydra Design Goals: How important is RDF?

As with JSON-LD, I feel the RDF part of Hydra is both
under-communicated and more of a nice-to-have than the core value of
the technologies. I think this is a good thing. While RDF and the
Semantic Web is awesome in its prospects, I highly doubt most people
getting their hands dirty with JSON-LD or Hydra will have a Semantic
Web perspective or problems related to RDF to solve.

Related and relevant: "JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web"
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/

I expect JSON-LD to be used as a way to express URIs and hypermedia in
JSON and I expect Hydra to be used as "The WSDL of HTTP / REST".
Please arrest me if I'm wrong in these assumptions.

Because of this, I think it's important to state this nice-to-have
status of RDF as a design goal, since from what I've gathered so far
from the discussions on this list, this isn't necessarily something
everyone is in agreement with. People who are deeply intimate with RDF
will of course have a very different perspective on the value of not
needing to know RDF to think a piece of technology (that is built on
top of RDF, nonetheless) is useful or not.

So: How important is RDF and the Semantic Web as a design goal for
Hydra? Should it be made more explicit?

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg           -=|=-        asbjorn@ulsberg.no
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

Received on Thursday, 1 October 2015 08:33:06 UTC