- From: Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:52:44 +0100
- To: William Waites <ww@styx.org>
- Cc: public-lod@w3.org
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 43 Temple Row Birmingham B2 5LS
Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 14:53:17 UTC