- From: Richard Light <richard@light.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:30:52 +0000
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- 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>
In message <eb19f3360912140143m291c464brb76379d3cc2b0235@mail.gmail.com>, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> writes >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. Despite the "Bah, Humbug!" tone of my previous mail, I am actually in favour too. I just want to tease out the extent to which we would be giving developers what they say they want, rather than what they could actually use. The value of JSON is surely that JSON support is widespread across a wide range of programming environments[1], rather than that JSON is a "simple" format. Would the alternative formats being discussed offer as much, in terms of their practical implementation for a wide range of languages? >> 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... I was thinking of a dynamic web service, which would at least remove the latency issue. Richard [1] http://json.org/ -- Richard Light
Received on Monday, 14 December 2009 10:31:29 UTC