- From: Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:08:41 +0100
- To: Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com>
- Cc: William Waites <ww@styx.org>, public-lod@w3.org
On Wed, 2011-06-22 at 15:52 +0100, Leigh Dodds wrote: > 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? +1 Don't raise barriers to linked data use/publication by tying it to widespread adoption and support for WebID. Dave
Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 15:09:12 UTC