Re: LDP interfaces in Java (based on Jena and JAX-RS)

hello kingsley.

On 2012-08-06 13:42 , "Kingsley Idehen" <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
>RDF is simply an option re. Linked Data. What's important is the
>behavior of URIs, not a specific family of data representation syntaxes
>and serialization formats.

that's one possible view of what "Linked Data" means and one i had a while
ago. but it seems that the majority of the linked data community has a
more constrained understanding of what it means, and when i used the term
to just mean what it says, literally, i.e. "data that is linked", it
seemed the linked date community largely objected to that and claimed that
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html mandated the use RDF.

while i am still of the opinion that it would be more useful to talk about
linked data as a concept of "how to properly make data available in the
framework of web architecture" (as you suggest), i have stopped using the
term "Linked Data" in that more general sense, mostly to avoid making
people unhappy.

of course, in the end everybody can use the term as they see fit, because
it is not a registered trademark, but realistically speaking given the
current landscape, "Linked Data" implies RDF.

you say "What's important is the behavior of URIs, not a specific family
of data representation syntaxes and serialization formats", and that's
much more REST than it is RDF. REST asks for some other constraints, but
one core constraint is that resource are identified by URI, that URIs can
be used for interactions using a variety of schemes, and that a RESTful
system is driven by clients following typed links that they find in
representations.

the main issue with RDF in the context of REST is that it has no notion of
links; all it says (in the Linked Data flavor) is that you can GET
everything that has an identity. this conflation of identification and
interaction is what makes it hard to envision RDF being RESTful, because
REST asks of all representations to have hypermedia semantics.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Monday, 6 August 2012 12:10:04 UTC