- From: Leigh Dodds <leigh@ldodds.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:44:23 +0100
- To: j.jakobitsch@semantic-web.at
- Cc: public-lod community <public-lod@w3.org>
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