Re: SPARQL, philosophy n'stuff..

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Jürgen Jakobitsch SWC
<j.jakobitsch@semantic-web.at> wrote:
> i think there's yet another point overlooked :
>
> what we are trying to do is to create barrier free means of
> communication on data level in a globalized world. this effort requires
> a common language.

Did you mean a common *query* language?

I'm not sure I agree. Mainly because no-one has yet created such as
thing, so we might find out that the bigger challenges are elsewhere.
I guess time will tell :)

I used to think that there might be convergence around common query
languages for APIs, but there's little evidence of that happening.

> my personal view is that providing simplier subsets of such a language
> (an api) only leads to the fact that nobody will learn the language (see
> pocket calculators,...), although there's hardly anything easier than to
> write a sparql query, it can be learned in a day.
>
> i do not really understand where this "the developer can't sparql, so
> let's provide something similar (easier)" - idea comes from.

Well if our goal is to create barrier free data sharing and re-use
then we should focus on achieving that regardless of technology, and
should be open to a variety of approaches. We can't decide that SPARQL
is the right solution and then just expect everyone to learn it.

Maybe it only takes a day to learn SPARQL, but personally I find that
usually I can get up to speed with a custom API in a few minutes, so
that's even faster.

And it turns out that often the issue isn't just learning SPARQL
alone, its also learning the data model [1].

> did anyone provide me with a wrapper for the english language? nope, had
> to learn it.

But I bet you learnt it in stages using a pedagogical approach that
guided you towards the basic building blocks first. And I expect there
were other reasons -- network effects -- why learning English was
worth up-front effort. We're not there with SPARQL.

Cheers,

L.

[1]. http://blog.ldodds.com/2011/06/16/giving-rdf-datasets-more-affordance/

--
Leigh Dodds
Freelance Technologist
Open Data, Linked Data Geek
t: @ldodds
w: ldodds.com
e: leigh@ldodds.com

Received on Thursday, 18 April 2013 11:44:51 UTC