Re: SPARQL, philosophy n'stuff..

On 4/18/13 7:48 AM, Norman Gray wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I haven't been following the original thread, so I'm responding just to Jürgen's point here.
>
> On 2013 Apr 18, at 12:21, Jürgen Jakobitsch SWC wrote:
>
>> i do not really understand where this "the developer can't sparql, so
>> let's provide something similar (easier)" - idea comes from.
>>
>> did anyone provide me with a wrapper for the english language? nope, had
>> to learn it.
>
> But Agree: a supposed difficulty of learning SPARQL is not the SW's problem.  There are so _many_ technical barriers to getting going with SW tools that it's the _number_ of barriers that dominates the overall loss-fraction, rather than the size of any barrier in particular.  I cannot believe that making SPARQL easier to use will make a difference here (though I'd be interested to be proved wrong).

+1

>
> In trying to evangelise for the SW in a highly techie but non-CS community, and in teaching the highlights in a non-techie community, I have come to the conclusion that it is damn hard to get into -- much more so than other technologies -- enough that people essentially _won't_ get into it unless they need to (because they've been instructed to learn about it) or unless they have a prior intellectual interest in such a way of thinking about the world.
>
> I don't think there's a short explanation of this.  But relevant features of the SW world are:
>
>    * There are _lots_ of components that have to be working before you can start playing around.  This was partly addressed a few years ago with 'SemWeb in a box' (was it Danny Ayers who was involved with this?), but that's not sufficient.
>
>    * The people involved are primarily CS academics.  The specific problem with that is that this community is broadly (for various reasons) too good at handling complicated and variously buggy systems; is interested in, or amused at, handling such systems; and so is willing to cheerfully tolerate a much more ragged experience than most technologists.
>
>    * CS academics, II: the 'interesting' stuff about the SW is the reasoning (and I'm not a CS academic, but I think that's interesting too, so I'm not disagreeing with this per se), but that means that a lot of the SW noise is about an aspect that most people find both perplexing and far from obviously useful.
>
>    * Trivially, but _not_ ignorably, names: 'semantics', 'ontology', and reasoning (before we start talking of 'supervenience') make people think it's much harder and more arcane than it is.

+1

>
> The major success of the LOD movement in terms of 'mindshare' is that it's evaded some of these problems, in the sense that it's fairly easy to explain and consume; the remaining problem is that providing it on the server side still requires negotiating these bear-traps.

+1

>
> All the best,
>
> Norman
>
>


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