Re: Linked Data Platform - Next

On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 at 18:35, Eric Jahn <eric@alexandriaconsulting.com>
wrote:

> Hello, we have integrated Apache Marmotta LDP into our human services
> data-centric platform.  What is the group's current consensus for the best
> future method for serving Linked Data restfully?  Is LDP a fully sufficient
> specification, and nothing more needs to be discussed :)  Or is there
> another method that competes with it, that better fulfills LDP's
> objectives? I know of Startin'Blox and Solid.  Thanks for the team's
> thoughts.
>

Solid developer here

More concretely, having worked with LDP on an hourly basis for the last few
years, I have encountered some pain points.  The hardest part is supporting
turtle.  This is ironic, as a long time turtle evangelist, I think it
enables you to write and think clearly in graph structures.  The tooling
around turtle is a tough ask, even for a believer.  It's a quite large
overhead and sometimes buggy.  The complexity of something gets much bigger
when dealing with multiple formats.  I have managed to make more progress
working with JSON(LD) and particularly so-called structured data islands
(which are not currently supported by LDP).  Turtle seemed a good choice at
the time, but JSON-LD seems to be well deployed on c. 100 million domains
and billions of pages now, mainly due to the benefit of server to server SEO

Timbl has often said that the goal of LDP is to "webize" the (UNIX) file
system.  To that extent, LDP has good options for performing CRUD
operations on resources, and also for listing a directory

The obvious things missing are users and permissions, which is quite a big
task in itself.  There has been some incremental advancement there with
WebID and WebACL

Continuing with the file system analogy.  In terms of functionality a nice
touch I think would to model the functionality of rsync, to replicate or
merge on LDP to another.  Most cloud systems do this, and LDP doesnt

Lots of scope to improve LDP if you think about how file systems have
evolved and the functions and commands they allow.  Open question is
whether to put it all in one spec, or allow pluggable modules for different
features.


>
> Eric Jahn
> CTO/Data Architect
> St. Petersburg, Florida
> hslynk.com
>