Re: Please publish Turtle or JSON-LD instead of RDF/XML [was Re: Recommendation for transformation of RDF/XML to JSON-LD in a web browser?]

On 2015-09-03 19:03, David Booth wrote:
> I encourage all RDF publishers to use one of the other standard RDF
> formats such as Turtle or JSON-LD.  All commonly used RDF tools now
> support Turtle, and many or most already support JSON-LD.

I have grown to (or to be brutally honest; tried very hard to) remain 
agnostic about the RDF formats. This is simply because given sufficient 
context, it is trivial to point out which format is preferable for both 
publication and expected consumption.

The decision to pick one or more formats over the other can easily boil 
down to understanding how and what will be handling the formats in the 
whole data pipeline.

It is great to see newcomers learn N-Triples/Turtle, because it is as 
human-friendly as it gets (at this time) to read and write statements. 
That experience is also an excellent investment towards SPARQL. Having 
said that, we are not yet at a state to publish semantically meaningful 
HTML documents by authoring Turtle. There is the expectation that some 
other out of band code or application needs to wrap it all up.

By the same token, JSON-LD is excellent for building applications by 
imperative means, however, it is stuck in a world where it is dependent 
on languages to manipulate and make use of the data. To generate it, it 
depends on something else as well. <Insert argument on JSON-LD being a 
tree structure just like RDF/XML here. GOTO 10>.

At the end of the day, however the data is pulled or pushed, it needs to 
end up on some user-interface. That UI is arguably and predominantly an 
HTML document out there. Hence my argument is that, all roads lead to HTML.

As I see it, RDFa gets the most mileage above all other formats for 
prose content, and a fair amount of re-use. It ends up on a webpage that 
is intended for humans, meanwhile remaining machine-friendly. A single 
code base (which is mostly declarative), a single GET, a single URL 
representation to achieve all of that.

I still remain agnostic on this matter, because there is no one size 
fits all. After all, in the command-line, N-Triples still has the last word.

So, as long as one speaks the RDF language, the rest tends to be 
something that the machines should be doing on behalf of humans any way, 
and that ought to remain as the primary focus. That is, speak RDF, keep 
improving the UI for it.

All formats bound to age - with the exception of HTML of course, because 
it still rocks and has yet to fail! ;)

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i

Received on Thursday, 3 September 2015 19:05:26 UTC