Re: FOAF Editor - was Re: WebID Frustration

On 8/7/13 12:13 PM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> Thanks Kingsley.
> Yeah, OK, you got me - anything is better than vi :-)
> Trouble is, of course, many of my friends don't have text editors.

Yes, but they have tools that already enable them work with plain text 
based content.

The problem we (as a community) have is that we haven't quite recovered 
from the problems that RDF/XML brought to bear on this whole Semantic 
Web Project. Net effect, we sometimes assume that all RDF model oriented 
concrete syntaxes are as user-unfriendly as RDF/XML.

Turtle is the antithesis of RDF/XML (triple scrambler!) because it makes 
triples visible. Thus, you'll find that your friends will be able to 
write Turtle using existing tools of choice. BTW -- If they can write 
long natural language sentences using these tools, they can certainly 
achieve the same results crafting concise Turtle based statements :-)

I encourage you to try it out on them. I had to go through this very 
same process a few years ago while trying to figure out a simple way to 
unveil what Linked Data was all about.

All major Word Processors and Spreadsheets have the ability to save to 
plain text. The same applies to most HTML editors (and you don't need to 
get into Microdata, RDFa, or any of that) .

As you are clearly indicating, which is also my world view and 
experience, folks don't want apps forcefully sitting between them and 
their data. They want data and apps to be loosely coupled.

Related:

1. http://bit.ly/SXGj8K -- Ora Lassila video presentation where he 
explains the problem with apps and data .

Kingsley
>
> On 7 Aug 2013, at 14:35, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
>   wrote:
>
>> On 8/7/13 9:11 AM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
>>> On 7 Aug 2013, at 13:26, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
>>>   wrote:
>>>>> <snip />
>>>>> Personally I would love to have something better than vi to edit my FOAF, much as I love it :-)
>>>> It now exists :-)
>>>>
>>> Ooo, go on Kingsley, give me hint as to what it is? :-)
>>> Hugh
>>>
>>>
>> Any editor or text editing tool that works for you. The file create, save, and share pattern is what compliments this approach. Thus, create, edit, and then save to your local (or shared) drive (worst case) and then publish to the Web via your own Web Server or via 3rd part storage provider services.
>>
>> Editing Turtle content by hand works well for little chunks of Linked Data. Spreadsheet tools also work well too for producing CSV that's (modulo header) Turtle or N-Triples etc..
>>
>>
>> The pieces:
>>
>> 1. Text Editing Tool -- whatever suits your user and usage profile
>> 2. Web Publication -- via your own Web Server or third party services (note Norman's example re how to re-route to your down domain).
>>
>> Personally, at the presentation layer, I don't have any notion of "better" or "best" since I've always seen that pursuit as being impossible for humans targets. Basically, this is a classic "horses for courses" type challenge that's best addressed by infrastructure dexterity as exemplified by the architecture of the world wide web (AWWW).
>>
>> Data, Context, and Interaction (DCI [1] pattern which builds on the MVC pattern [2] ) should be loosely coupled.
>>
>> Links:
>>
>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data,_context_and_interaction
>> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model–view–controller .
>>
>> -- 
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>


-- 

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