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

Bernard Vatant wrote:
> 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

Bernard,

I hope my last response (with some corrections) makes my point clearer 
re. booststrap i.e., broad adoption of Linked Data as expressed via the 
evolution of the LOD cloud pictorial :-)

Ironically, I criticize RDF/XML a lot, but out sponger cartridges (basic 
and meta)  are major exploiters of RDF/XML re. what I see as its best 
use: machine level transformations.

Kingsley


>
>
>
> 2010/7/1 Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org <mailto:danbri@danbri.org>>
>
>     (cc: list trimmed to LOD list.)
>
>     On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Kingsley Idehen
>     <kidehen@openlinksw.com <mailto: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 <mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Mondeca
> 3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France
> Web:    http://www.mondeca.com
> Blog:    http://mondeca.wordpress.com
> ----------------------------------------------------


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 19:08:20 UTC