Re: WebID vs. JSON (Was: Re: Think before you write Semantic Web crawlers)

Hi,

On 22 June 2011 15:41, William Waites <ww@styx.org> wrote:
> What does WebID have to do with JSON? They're somehow representative
> of two competing trends.
>
> The RDF/JSON, JSON-LD, etc. work is supposed to be about making it
> easier to work with RDF for your average programmer, to remove the
> need for complex parsers, etc. and generally to lower the barriers.
>
> The WebID arrangement is about raising barriers. Not intended to be
> the same kind of barriers, certainly the intent isn't to make
> programmer's lives more difficult, rather to provide a good way to do
> distributed authentication without falling into the traps of PKI and
> such.
>
> While I like WebID, and I think it is very elegant, the fact is that I
> can use just about any HTTP client to retrieve a document whereas to
> get rdf processing clients, agents, whatever, to do it will require
> quite a lot of work [1]. This is one reason why, for example, 4store's
> arrangement of /sparql/ for read operations and /data/ and /update/
> for write operations is *so* much easier to work with than Virtuoso's
> OAuth and WebID arrangement - I can just restrict access using all of
> the normal tools like apache, nginx, squid, etc..
>
> So in the end we have some work being done to address the perception
> that RDF is difficult to work with and on the other hand a suggestion
> of widespread putting in place of authentication infrastructure which,
> whilst obviously filling a need, stands to make working with the data
> behind it more difficult.
>
> How do we balance these two tendencies?

By recognising that often we just need to use existing technologies
more effectively and more widely, rather than throw more technology at
a problem, thereby creating an even greater education and adoption
problem?

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
Mobile: 07850 928381
http://kasabi.com
http://talis.com

Talis Systems Ltd
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Birmingham
B2 5LS

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 14:53:17 UTC