Re: "DOM" for RDF?

On 02/12/2013 11:23, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>
> I think my conclusion from the DOM experience was that actually
> people wanted jQuery -- something optimized for the language.
>
> My own RDF APIs have been optimized for js and python respectively,
> though they share style and many calls.
>
> See undocumented rdflib.js https://github.com/linkeddata/rdflib.js/
>
> I can still think of further optimizations to make writing code
> even smoother.
But that's precisely my point: how many people even know about your 
undocumented code, and how many of them could make effective use of it, 
as you add clever new features?

Putting my point another way, as thing stand I would see little value in 
anyone trying to write a book about software for processing RDF, since 
it would have to cover a multitude of offerings, and would be out of 
date before it was finished.  A centrally-provided, language-independent 
API spec provides a way of "telling the story" which can't be matched by 
fragmented individual efforts, however well-crafted (and -documented :-) ).

Richard

>
> Timbl
>
>
> On 2013-12 -02, at 11:00, Richard Light wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm sure this has been discussed many times and/or ages ago, but I am 
>> struck by the absence of a DOM-like W3C framework for RDF. By this, I 
>> mean "an application programming interface (API) for [RDF graphs]", 
>> which will be "a standard programming interface that can be used in a 
>> wide variety of environments and applications. The [RDF] DOM is 
>> designed to be used with any programming language". (Quotes taken 
>> from [1])
>>
>> A quick search turns up a number of PHP-based libraries, and the odd 
>> one for javascript, Delphi, Python and Ruby, but as far as I can see 
>> there is little, or no, commonality of approach or functionality 
>> amongst these offerings.  This means that a programmer (a) has to 
>> decide which of these widely varying approaches to adopt, (b) only 
>> gets whatever documentation each chooses to provide and (c) is faced 
>> with a complete rewrite, should they decide to switch RDF platform.
>>
>> Might this situation be a significant factor in the slow take-up of 
>> RDF by mainstream developers?
>>
>> Richard
>>
>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/introduction.html
>>
>> -- 
>> *Richard Light*
>

-- 
*Richard Light*