Yet another serialization format?

Hi all,

I have been lurking on this list now for quite some time and followed the
discussions with great interest but haven't contributed anything yet -
partly because I'm still not sure whether I really understood what the
addressed use cases are.

As it appears to me, currently the goal is to create "yet another RDF
serialization format". However, recently it looked like the project is
moving away from RDF and tried to create a *simple* linked data approach
which is effectively a subset of the features RDF offers. This is not really
surprising as RDF is at its core a spec for describing graphs.

Is this really what we are trying to achieve here?

The only use case I've heard here is, as far as I remember, PaySwarm - which
I admittedly didn't have a close look at. I think a linked data approach
based on JSON should be based on the applications where JSON is currently
used, i.e., Web APIs. One of the things the clearly differentiates Web APIs
from the "document-based Web" is that the representations usually follow a
quite strict schema and all look the same.

Is it thus really necessary to change all those representations to comply to
a yet-to-define specification? Wouldn't it be more sensible to create a
specification which allows to describe those existing representations and to
transform those to a graph of linked data? This would lead to a clear
upgrade path for existing systems without breaking all of its clients. In
the approach I'm talking about, the semantics/links would be added as a
layer on top of the current data (separation of concerns).


--
Markus Lanthaler

Received on Monday, 27 June 2011 15:38:28 UTC