- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:43:19 +0100
- To: Richard Light <richard@light.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: "Hammond, Tony" <t.hammond@nature.com>, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com>, public-lod@w3.org, Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>, John Sheridan <John.Sheridan@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk>
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Richard Light <richard@light.demon.co.uk> wrote: > In message <C74BADC3.20683%t.hammond@nature.com>, "Hammond, Tony" > <t.hammond@nature.com> writes >> >> Normal developers will always want simple. > > Surely what normal developers actually want are simple commands whereby data > can be streamed in, and become available programmatically within their > chosen development environment, without any further effort on their part? > > Personally I don't see how providing a format which is easier for humans to > read helps to achieve this. Do normal developers like writing text parsers > so much? > > Give 'em RDF and tell them to develop better toolsets ... RDF tooling still has some rough edges, it must be said. I am as enthusiastic about RDF as anyone (having been involved since 1997) but I've also seen the predictable results where on occasion people (eg. standards groups) have been 'arm twisted' into using the technology against their judgement and preferences. We don't have a solid well-packaged and tested RDF/XML parser for the Ruby language yet, for example. And while we do have librdfa integration into the Redland/Raptor C toolkit, it hasn't yet propagated into all the easy install settings we'll eventually find it - like my Amazon EC2 Ubuntu box, or the copy of Fink I installed recently on my MacBook Pro. And in PHP we have a fantastic RDF toolkit in ARC2, but it relies on MySQL for all complex querying. Plenty of scope for toolkit polish and improvement, nothing to worry massively about, but also lots of things that will cause pain if we take a stubborn "RDF or nothing" approach. I wholeheartedly applaud the pragmatic approach from Jeni and others. > Come to that, RDF-to-JSON conversion could be a downstream service that > someone else offers. You don't have to do it all. That could be useful for some, and inappropriate for others. Every new step in the chain introduces potential problems with latency, bugs, security and so on... cheers, Dan
Received on Monday, 14 December 2009 09:43:47 UTC