- From: Nathan <nathan@webr3.org>
- Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:21:08 +0000
- To: Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com>
- CC: public-lod@w3.org, Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>, John Sheridan <John.Sheridan@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk>
Jeni Tennison wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As part of the linked data work the UK government is doing, we're
> looking at how to use the linked data that we have as the basis of APIs
> that are readily usable by developers who really don't want to learn
> about RDF or SPARQL.
>
> One thing that we want to do is provide JSON representations of both RDF
> graphs and SPARQL results. I wanted to run some ideas past this group as
> to how we might do that.
>
[big snip]
in all honesty, I strongly feel this should be handled on the
clientside, keep everything in rdf is good and serves all audiences, for
those who don't want to learn it, then why not provide client side
libraries to consume the rdf and turn it in to a format more preferable
for them?
Personally I just created some helper classes (details are out of the
scope of this) but essentially they let me use the following syntax
against RDF
print object->{'foaf:name'};
which I hope you'll agree really isn't any more complex than:
print object->name
Additionally it gently introduces developers to the notion of RDF,
predicates and that there really is a better way to be doing things; but
keeps it as a learning curve they can choose to take at their own time.
And finally the above approach of keeping the predicate but using
namespace prefixes will work for all rdf, not just a small subset of rdf
graphs, thus saving the "normal developer" from learning 100's of
different API's.
Many Regards,
Nathan
Received on Sunday, 13 December 2009 03:22:24 UTC