Re: GRDDLing JSON?

Hi,
JSON-LD is not just a RDF serialization, that's a limited view sometimes
producing "hard feelings" about JSON-LD and bad practices like moving huge
amount of data serialized as JSON-LD when even simple N-QUADS would do the
same trick with much lesser costs.

JSON-LD is a great way to integrate different domain models that are
accessible through APIs using JSON. You don't even need an API provider to
add a context, you can easily add yours when processing a JSON. Not
everyone cares about RDF graphs, many domain models are much easier to
process as trees ;)

Best,
Filip

On Fri, Feb 9, 2024 at 8:22 PM Paul Tyson <phtyson@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Yes, what Dan said about json-ld context. Ever since the birth of json
> they've been struggling to make it do (poorly) what xml does well, and I
> wouldn't want to put an oar in that water--but if you do, search for "json
> transformation language".
>
> For setting up a processing pipeline declaratively (and standardly) you
> can't beat XProc[2].
>
> Thanks for bringing up GRDDL, and for your contributions. It should have
> been used more.
>
> Regards,
> --Paul
>
> [1] https://www.ottr.xyz/
> [2]
>
> On 2/9/24 12:42, Dan Brickley wrote:
>
>
> You can do quite a lot of mapping vanilla json into json-ld using json-ld
> contexts. Unlike xml there are only so many ways to say stuff and the
> content tends towards being objects and properties anyhow.
>
> If you’re going to have a turing complete mapping framework you probably
> should just use JS.
>
> Cheers
>
> Dan
>
> On Fri, 9 Feb 2024 at 17:58, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm rather out of the loop, so apologies if something like this has
>> already been discussed, implemented even. But I feel obliged to flag an
>> issue, offer a potential solution (which might already exist).
>>
>> # Use case :
>> For the past few days I've been working on a bit of code where a
>> processing pipeline will be set up declaratively. I'm still on baby steps,
>> but it's a place where RDF should be ideal. A little graph defines the
>> nodes & arcs of the processing system.
>>
>> To get the code started, I only need a trivial model to work from. A
>> simple list, (input reader)->(process)-> (output writer).
>> So at this stage, it seemed reasonable just to use a minimal JSON list.
>> Generalise to RDF later.
>> There's a sequence of nodes, each with an instance ID and a type for the
>> nature of the thing.
>> A very simple JSON structure covers it.
>>
>> # Issue :
>> But looking ahead, I wondered how to migrate from the arbitrary JSON to
>> an RDF model. Obviously, JSON-LD.
>> In my head I saw a namespace declaration, the rest just lifted & placed
>> there from the keys in the JSON mappings. But in practice, it's not quite
>> like that, it gets ugly fast.
>> I guess it's basically a syntax issue.
>> What you see in the (arbitrary) JSON expression is visually/intuitively
>> understandable. Ditto in Turtle. But in JSON-LD, any kind, the immediacy of
>> interpretation by a human (this one at least)  is lost.
>>
>> # Proposed Solution :
>> I don't know if anyone remembers GRDDL [1]. An elegant approach for
>> bridging between anyXML and RDF.  One added attribute in the doc, to say it
>> has an RDF representation and here's how to get it. It's an easy inclusion
>> in namespaced XML, we* went for XSLT transformers, a very immediate
>> approach. Imagine an org with loads of XML documents of the same shape. A
>> transformation has to be written once, that pointer inserted in all these
>> docs, very low-effort mapping to the RDF world.
>> As far as I'm aware, to date, absolutely no-one has ever used this.
>>
>> *But* the idea is great. Forget XML, let's do JSON.
>> Add one (presumably top-level) name value pair in a JSON doc:
>>
>> { "http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#", "http://example.org/this-to-that
>> "
>> ...
>> }
>>
>> At http://example.org/this-to-that you have the definition of how to
>> take this arbitrary JSON and make it a citizen of the Web.
>>
>> I'll say again, you might well just want to bin this if such things have
>> been dealt with already.
>> But it did strike me that in practice, I was facing horrible stuff to
>> look at. Please remember RDF/XML's role in adoption.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Danny.
>>
>> [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/
>>
>> * yeah, I was on the GRDDL Working Group. Memory totally gone over my
>> contributions, but in these things I generally only offer /wrong/ arguments
>> (realise years later), which post-factum I convince myself are useful to
>> get the people with their heads screwed on to look at things more closely.
>> I'm still a little irritated I didn't get a credit in the doc, I poked
>> Dan Connolly and he said he's sort it, Didn't. It did mean something to me,
>> one of the very few things I've been involved with which had a very
>> pleasing end product (even if absolutely no-one uses it).
>>
>> I should also confess I was mouthy in the JSON-LD group at the start, but
>> quietly shuffled away when I realised the other folks had magnitudes better
>> grasp.
>>
>> --
>> ----
>>
>> https://hyperdata.it <http://hyperdata.it/danja>
>>
>>