Re: Hydra Design Goals: How important is RDF?

On 1 October 2015 at 10:32, Asbjørn Ulsberg <asbjorn@ulsberg.no> wrote:

> 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.
>

Why do you think this?


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


Yet another RDF hit piece.  Do you agree with it?  Any of the points in
particular?  By the way the author of that post is using RDF now.


>
>
> 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.
>

Prediction is a dangerous game.  The web has shown time and again that our
assumptions for the future dont always match reality.  What's better is to
say both Hydra and JSON LD are useful tools.  There's other useful tools
such as turtle and rml ( http://rml.io/ ).  As the space becomes
(hopefully) more mature, we can observe what tooling becomes popular.
We're still in the first 1% of the journey.


>
> 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.
>

RDF is a nice to have, because it has several interesting architectural
properties (explained in design issues and other places).  RDF could be
swapped out for a similar technology, but as far as I know none exists, so
let's just embrace it for now, until one exists.  Otherwise say which
properties you'd like to drop and replace with, but I think gaining
consensus would be hard.


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

I think it's a critical component, at this point in time.  But would be
open to suggestion.


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