RE: Hydra Status

On 17 Nov 2016 at 02:25, Asbjørn Ulsberg wrote:
> 2016-11-16 21:12 GMT+01:00 Markus Lanthaler:
>> But people working on the design of Hydra itself need to be familiar with (or
>> willing to learn the basics of) RDF and other technologies Hydra is based on.
>> Otherwise experience has shown that constructive discussions are very difficult.
> 
> Although I’m a complete RDF novice, I think my ~20 years of experience
> in other related fields such as protocol design, REST API design,
> specification writing, etc., are valuable enough for me to contribute
> at a constructive level. :-)

Absolutely! I'm certain we will profit enormously from your experience


>> This doesn't mean people without background in those technologies and
>> without time to learn them can't participate. We will need input, use cases,
>> feedback etc. People without RDF background are crucial to ensure we built
>> something approachable to everyone and eventually document it in an
>> accessible manner.
>
> This is actually what I feel is one of my most important tasks as a
> member of the Hydra Community Group. Not knowing a whole lot of RDF,
> never having written an application using SPARQL, Turtle or any
> related technologies, might make me and other people like me better
> suited to evaluate how easy Hydra is to understand.

Yep. It's unfortunately quite easy to get blind for things like that if you work long enough on something.


> When we designed Atom, I think we struck a good balance between "easy
> to grasp", "strict enough to work” (such as basing the date format on
> RFC 3999) and "powerful enough” for it to be objectively better than
> competing “standards". My feeling is that Atom was the first non-HTML
> format that popularised hypermedia, in many ways without users of the
> technology knowing that’s what it was (as is the case with HTML).

Right. I often cite Atom as a poster child of RESTful design. We tried to strike the same balance with JSON-LD and I aim to do it again with Hydra.


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Thursday, 17 November 2016 21:01:55 UTC