Re: Loosely-coupled (modular) LDP, was Re: Recharter scope

On 11/18/14 4:38 PM, henry.story@bblfish.net wrote:
>> On 18 Nov 2014, at 20:15, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
>>
>>> As for "No RDF dependency", this is exactly the type of bad argument
>>> on the part of so called RESTafarians that we have to resist very strongly.
>> Yes, because for some reason RDF is now locked in the "Data Format" realm.
> You mean that is how some people have tried to paint it.

Yes, but this is a consequence of narrativea that veered them in that 
direction, years ago. Remember, there was a time when RDF and RDF/XML 
where so intermingled you couldn't easily distinguish one from the other.

I ran poll after poll about this matter, and the result was always the 
same i.e., RDF is perceived as a format :(

If we had shown the use of <link/> (as part of Plain Old Semantic HTML), 
Link:, CSV etc.. alongside the likes of RDF/XML, TURTLE, N-Triples, the 
issue of notation would have bubbled up into the general discourse. 
Instead, we were left with "abstract syntax" and "concrete syntaxes" 
which intuitively veers back towards syntax.

>
>> How can we get folks to understand, and then ultimately accept the fact that RDF is a Language (system of signs, syntax, and semantics for encoding and decoding information) that's loosely associated with a variety of notations (mechanism for representing the words of a language)?
> It was more difficult when the only format was RDF/XML with XML conseived of as
> the universal syntax.

Yes, and it took close to 13 years to get TURTLE acknowledged as an 
alternative notation, that was official in the eyes of the W3C.

>   Now we have Turtle and JSON-LD (especially JSON-LD) this
> argument is petering out.

Better late than never, but the 13 year crawl has had its costs on the 
overall narrative.

>   I am happy to see that the  Social Web Working Group
> went for JSON-LD format for activity streams. So I think that the syntax
> confusion of RDF is dying out, and the advantages of RDF are starting
> to be understood.

Not in regard to that example. JSON-LD is rarely ever about relation 
semantics. It is still much more about an alternative to XML. To me it 
sometimes comes across as RDF/XML 2014.

>
> The tools are much better than they used to be also, so the main reasons
> the plain REST folks had for being against RDF is going too.

Sorta.

Tools (which are applications) are certainly needed, but even when we 
refer to "tools" we are sometimes quite unspecific. Thus, we also end up 
undermining those that have invested blood and equity in developing 
specific kinds of tools over the years.

"We don't have any good RDF tools" is not the way to solve the tooling 
problem. Indicating that we need more tools (across a wide spectrum) is 
a lot more community friendly, IMHO.

> CPUs have also
> dramatically increased in speed, and many other things have changed in the mean
> time.

Yes, and memory is much cheaper too!

> So I think we can argue against the fudge that RDF is non RESTful and
> be on solid ground with more people joining us at an ever faster rate.

We've always been on solid ground. We just need to put more energy into 
tools and narratives that address a variety of audience profiles. The 
onus is on all of us to tell the same RDF story in a myriad of ways, to 
spectrum of audience profiles.

>
> I am just saying, let's not just give up on REST & RDF.

I never will. I don't know how :)

> The two are meant for
> each other.

Amen!


Kingsley
>
> Henry
>
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>
>


-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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