Re: Open source release of "Stralo", a new Linked Data platform

On 10/18/17 3:52 PM, Bram Biesbrouck wrote:
>
>     Hi Bram
>
>     I started  Stralo from the shell ,
>     and filled my first page.
>

Hi Bram,

>
>     I fail to see the LOD aspect .
>     Where are the triples ?
>     Can I display a public FOAF profile in Stralo ?
>     How could one implement, for instance, a contact management in
>     Stralo ?
>
>
> Hehe, actually that's the whole point (and strength) of Stralo: the
> user is never confronted with triples.

Every time you encounter a hyperlink in a web page you are confronting a
triple of the form: [ schema:uri <#someHyperlink> ]. Naturally, the user
doesn't see or immediately deal with that, but the effect is there i.e,
click on the link and it resolves to a description of what it identifies.

> From the beginning, we wanted to make a Linked Data system that's
> transparent to the user because most people don't really understand RDF.

Most people don't understand how RDF has been described over the years.
I think most literate people (irrespective of native language)
understand the subject, predicate, object structure of a sentence.

> That's why we totally hid it away behind a user friendly drag-and-drop
> interface.
>
> All data is stored in RDFa tags (in between the HTML), so actually
> every page you make is a collection of triples.

Yes, I can see you've opted for RDFa based structured data islands
embedded in HTML which addresses on part of the issue at hand. That
said, you still need to address the core requirement of hyperlinks
resolving to documents that describe whatever they identify.

For instance, you have <http://www.reinvention.be/ontology/> as the
object of a <http://www.w3.org/ns/rdfa#usesVocabulary> relation in all
your pages, that hyperlink doesn't resolve to anything:

curl -IL http://www.reinvention.be/ontology/
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:13:20 GMT
Server: Jetty(9.3.9.M1)
Location: http://www.reinvention.be/en/ontology/
Content-Type: text/plain

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:13:20 GMT
Server: Jetty(9.3.9.M1)
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "P6HhiQ"
Cache-Control: must-revalidate,no-cache,no-store
Content-Type: text/html;charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Length: 321
Vary: Accept-Encoding

> If you want to see the triples, go to the folder where you launched
> Stralo, go to "storage/pages/data/" and find the "meta folder" of the
> page you created (the shadow-folder that begins with a dot). In that
> folder, open this file: "proxy/application/n-triples/blocks-core_rdf.nt" 
> There you will find the triples.

Linked Data is fundamentally about entities identified by hyperlinks (in
the form of HTTP URIs). Net effect, each entity identifier resolves to
an entity description document.

Imagine if browsers decided not to display hyperlinks in a manner that
encouraged users to click? What kind of value would such a solution offer?

The fundamental virtue of RDF is that it enables the construction of
subject, predicate, object based sentences using hyperlinks. 

The fundamental virtue of HTTP URIs (hyperlinks) is that they pack
denotation and connotation into a single act of indirection that users
experience via the "click" action as part of a serendipitous-discovery
oriented user interaction pattern (a/k/a follow-your-nose.
>
> As for your question: yes, that's totally possible. As you probably
> saw when creating the first page, Stralo is build around a concept of
> "blocks". And adding your own type of block is how you extend it. So
> implementing what you want is as simple as adding a FOAF-block
> implementation.
>
> As an example, take a look at the Fact-block. That's where RDF hits
> the User Interface the closest.
>
> b. 
>  

Making your hyperlinks honor the expectations of Linked Data deployment
(i.e., RDF sentences that leverage hyperlinks as subject, predicate,
object identifiers) will ensure broader understanding and appreciation :)

-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen       
Founder & CEO 
OpenLink Software   (Home Page: http://www.openlinksw.com)

Weblogs (Blogs):
Legacy Blog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/
Blogspot Blog: http://kidehen.blogspot.com
Medium Blog: https://medium.com/@kidehen

Profile Pages:
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/kidehen/
Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Kingsley-Uyi-Idehen
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kidehen
Google+: https://plus.google.com/+KingsleyIdehen/about
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen

Web Identities (WebID):
Personal: http://kingsley.idehen.net/public_home/kidehen/profile.ttl#i
        : http://id.myopenlink.net/DAV/home/KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/kingsley.ttl#this