Re: Hydra compared with JSON API, other specifications

First thing I would say that RDF is just part of the graph database
trend. Google uses Knowledge Graph, Microsoft has Office Graph,
Facebook has Open Graph and GraphQL. And there is Neo4J and other
database providers which are growing steadily. RDF is the
best-standardized graph language, so it gets attention whenever graph
data gets attention. Does someone still want to argue graph adoption?

In enterprise IT companies which are far from leading technically, the
problem is not the obscurity or esotericism of RDF or graphs however.
It is mismanagement and lack of vision. Left hand not knowing what the
right hand is doing, miscommunication, non-technical managers and
architectural astronauts, dozens of non-integrated products with
overlapping functionality, decades old legacy code and and frameworks
piled on one each other, rush for more features at the cost of
technical debt, etc. etc. The R&D department might actually be
developing something interesting while the management never looks at
it or chooses to ignore it.

RDF is not for those guys. It is so flexible and simple that their
minds would not comprehend.

And JSON(-LD) is a distraction. It's not what matters, it's just a
format among others, which happens to be well-supported in JavaScript.

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 8:34 PM, Asbjørn Ulsberg <asbjorn@ulsberg.no> wrote:
> On 11. jan. 2016, at 15.03, Thomas Hoppe <thomas.hoppe@n-fuse.de> wrote:
>
>> On 01/11/2016 10:55 AM, Martynas Jusevičius wrote:
>>> Just to clarify, what people of which industry?
>> ...commercial IT enterprises and the open source, non-profit world.
>> So basically everything except academia.
>
> I’d just like to echo this, since a lot of people having long time experience with the Semantic Web and related technologies seem to have a  skewed perception on its relevance outside of the circles they’re involved in.
>
> The ~20 years of experience I have from working in Enterprise IT tells me that besides some small groups investing in Topic Maps and similar technologies, the ideas behind the Semantic Web and the Semantic Web itself is at best seen as obscure and alien and at best completely unknown.
>
> I hope and think JSON-LD and Hydra can change that, but I think this is important for people to realize when working in this field and which was a crucial part of JSON-LD’s road to success. I think JSON-LD appeals to people not because of its RDF foundation, but despite it. It strikes an almost perfect balance between being easy to understand and applicable to real-world and enterprise problems as well as being a great application of RDF and through that being able to sew the web tighter together.
>
> I think most people will choose JSON-LD for the former benefit and discover the latter almost accidentally. In the same way, I think people will use Hydra as something as banale as “WSDL for REST” and discover its hypermedia richness and power over time and by chance.
>
> --
> Asbjørn Ulsberg           -=|=-        asbjorn@ulsberg.no
> «He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

Received on Monday, 11 January 2016 23:12:03 UTC