Re: Show me the money - (was Subjects as Literals)

Hi Dan, Kingsley

Happy to see you expose clearly those things that have been also in the
corner of my mind since Kingsley started to hammer the EAV drum a while ago.

I've been also in training and introduction to RDF insisted on the fact that
RDF was somehow just an avatar of the old paradigm EAV or however you name
it, and I think it's a good way to introduce it, and keep all the gory
aspects for later on, and in particular the syntactic mess (or should I say,
joyful diversity).

But I follow Dan on the fact that the Linked Data cloud has flourished on
top of RDF-XML, at least as exchange and publication format. And I must say
that what I see daily with data providers and consumers around Mondeca
applications is data coming in and out in RDF-XML, for better and worse
indeed. And for what I see, it's easier to have data providers now familiar
with XML understand RDF through RDF-XML, by making XML-friendly RDF. RDF-XML
has not to be ugly and unreadable and untractable, even if some tools have
never care about that (no names).
And as the grease-monkey in charge of migrating miscellaneous data to feed
the semantic engine, I'm still quite happy with the current
CSV-to-plain-XML-to-RDF-XML (via XSLT, yes) route.

And I will give you the short feedback of our CTO in Mondeca after reading
the output of RDFNext workshop. "Well, no canonical XML syntax?". Believe
me, all the rest he did not even care mentioning. Don't want to add to the
"I wish I'd been there" but I would myself exchange every other evolution
and future work for a canonical RDF-XML syntax. I know, I know, don't tell
me.

Bernard



2010/7/1 Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>

> (cc: list trimmed to LOD list.)
>
> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Cut long story short.
>
> [-cut-]
>
> > We have an EAV graph model, URIs, triples and a variety of data
> > representation mechanisms. N3 is one of those, and its basically the
> > foundation that bootstrapped the House of HTTP based Linked Data.
>
> I have trouble believing that last point, so hopefully I am
> misunderstanding your point.
>
> Linked data in the public Web was bootstrapped using standard RDF,
> serialized primarily in RDF/XML, and initially deployed mostly by
> virtue of people enthusiastically publishing 'FOAF files' in the
> (RDF)Web. These files, for better or worse, were overwhelmingly in
> RDF/XML.
>
> When TimBL wrote http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html in
> 2006 he used what is retrospectively known as Notation 2, not its
> successor Notation 3.
>
> "Notation2"[*] was an unstriped XML syntax ( see original in
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20061115043657/http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
> ). That DesignIssues note was largely a response to the FOAF
> deployment.
> "This linking system was very successful, forming a  growing social
> network, and dominating, in 2006, the linked data available on the
> web."
>
> The LinkedData design note argued that (post RDFCore cleanup and
> http-range discussions) we could now use URIs for non-Web things, and
> that this would be easier than dealing with bNode-heavy data. Much of
> the subsequent successes come from following that advice. Perhaps N3
> played an educational role in showing that RDF had other
> representations; but by then, SPARQL, NTriples etc were also around.
> As was RDFa, http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/paper/58  ...
>
> I have a hard time seeing N3 as the foundation that bootstrapped
> things. Most of the substantial linked RDF in Web by 2006 was written
> in RDF/XML, and by then the substantive issues around linking,
> reference, aggregation, identification and linking etc were pretty
> well understood. I don't dislike N3; it was a good technology testbed
> and gave us the foundation for SPARQL's syntax, and for the Turtle
> subset. But it's role outside our immediate community has been pretty
> limited in my experience.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> [*] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Syntax.html
>
>


-- 
Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Vocabulary & Data Engineering
Tel:       +33 (0) 971 488 459
Mail:     bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
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