Re: Publication of scientific research

On 4/25/13 2:05 AM, Ivan Herman wrote:
> As for the metadata: I think even turtle is too complicated for many (sorry Kingsley). I am not talking about the average readers of this list; I am talking about authors in other disciplines. But, if we bite the bullet and we say that papers are submitted in PDF, we could at least require to include the metadata in the PDF file. After all, the metadata is included in PDF in XMP format, which is (a slightly ugly and restricted version of) RDF/XML. It is ugly, but we have enough tools around to turn it into Turtle, or JSON-LD, or whatever.

Believe me, I used to believe that Turtle was too complicated for the 
casual user. By that I mean a literate individual (in any natural 
language) that would like to use the "scribble" approach to data 
creation, integration, and publication.

The user profile I have in mind certainly isn't scoped to this or any 
list associated with Linked Data or the the broader Semantic Web etc..

Prefixes and absolute URIs are the two things that create the illusion 
of Turtle being complex.

I arrived at my conclusions by testing my theory against a whole range 
of profiles - kids, teenagers, and adults.

Once I dropped prefixes and absolute URIs from the introduction it was 
smooth sailing. Remember, across all natural languages underlies a form 
of subject-predicate-object or subject-verb-object sentence structure. 
Thus, <#this> <#relatesTo> <#that> etc.. becomes easy to understand.

Remember the claim I make on this very day:
Turtle is the key to unleashing the full potential of RDF model based 
Linked Data that scales to the Web :-)

Note, HTML is too complicated [1], and that's why we don't have a fully 
functional read-write Web. All we need to do is get people to understand 
that a text editor is the ultimate starting tool for data curation. Once 
the basics of structured data curation  -- based on the RDF data model 
-- are understood, this new profile of data curator will then look to 
tools to exploit the productivity benefits that they add too the endeavor.

Links:

1. http://bit.ly/ZJSaXP -- TimBL on the subject of HTML and its 
complications.

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen