Re: JSON Emergency Brake

On Aug 24, 2011, at 12:51 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:

> originally sent in response to Thomas' post -
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/2011Aug/0131.html
> 
> Thomas suggested bringing the detailed discussion back over here.
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
> Date: 24 August 2011 01:20
> Subject: Re: JSON Emergency Brake
> To: tomac@google.com, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>,
> ian.davis@talis.com, ivan@w3.org, Michael Hausenblas
> <michael.hausenblas@deri.org>, jeremy@topquadrant.com
> 
> 
> [offlist, I'm not in the wg]
> 
> The relative size of target audience of JSON-LD (Web developers who
> use JSON) compared with that of RDF/JSON (RDF developers who want
> JSON) does suggest the former is the priority.
> 
> But if RDF/JSON is to be abandoned, then JSON-LD should be able to act
> as a substitute - i.e. round-tripping of RDF must be possible and
> mapping(s) provided in the spec. (I believe things are inclined this
> way already, but I'm not sure it's in the charter).

Currently, round-tripping is supported; my own implementation actually relies on this. I parse data into a graph and use that graph for subsequent serialization, rather than sticking within the JSON space.

> Whether RDF/JSON continues or not, if JSON-LD is to be attractive to a
> broad range of non-RDF-oriented developers, it should be a reasonably
> simple syntax. As it stands I believe the inclusion of CURIES is an
> unnecessary complication. The use of simple name/IRI mapping in
> @context should be enough.

CURIEs have been moved to an advanced section, and really just fall out of term support. There are use cases where prefixed URIs are quite useful. However, I could consider changing to PNAMES if that had enough support, but I don't think the processing rules really demand that restriction.

> Yes, it will get verbose if a large number
> of terms is needed in a single document, but I doubt very much that
> would be the norm among the target audience. (An @vocab mechanism is
> also mentioned in the spec, though I'm not sure if that's current or
> orphaned artifacts of a previous draft).

@vocab is still intended to be in there, but we may have lost some text along the way.

> Whatever, having a raft of
> different syntactical ways of saying the same thing looks very like a
> repeat of RDF/XML. Also I wouldn't be surprised to see antagonism from
> some in the HTML community simply because CURIES resemble XML
> namespaces.
> 
> (I mentioned this to Manu in G+, can't find the thread - he defended
> CURIES in JSON-LD because his own application needed vast amounts of
> markup without them)

CURIEs, PNAMEs and QNAMEs all have a fairly long history in RDF, and thinking of a first-class RDF serialization without some support for prefixing seems out of step with the goal of having JSON-LD be such a language. Given that prefix support pretty much falls out of having terms already, I don't think it should be removed.

> Cheers,
> Danny.
> 
> --
> http://dannyayers.com


Thanks for the feedback!

Gregg

Received on Wednesday, 24 August 2011 20:15:38 UTC