Re: Linked Data Browser

I generally agree with you. I did not intend to generalise HTML+RDFa to
a point where it should be used for everything. My original reply was
specific to the LON case because it happens to cater to both humans and
machines. That is its design requirement.

On 2018-03-16 20:38, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> If everyone had a Linked Data browser, I wouldn't need to bother creating the html myself.

I think the idea is that, if need to, one can provide a default UI for
the data. HTML+RDFa (and other stuff on that stack) just happens to do
that, but the other RDF syntaxes less so of a "UI" for a "human". In any
case, nothing stops HTML+RDFa from being processed, and viewed
differently. The underlying mechanism permits that.

> My objective might well be to publish RDF - there is no reason (for some of my datasets) to publish html at all, as there is no expectation that humans will want to read it.

> So, if a human does, they can do the work of formatting it into a human-readable form, if they want.

Certainly, depends on the data. For prose, one would have to go out of
their way to avoid HTML. Even with all the machine exchange, sooner or
later, information (in whatever shape or form) normally makes its way to
a human. I suppose there are use cases where humans don't need to know
certain information but that's not what we are really discussing here I
think.

> I often start with just the RDF, for example in an RDF store, and serve RDF in whatever form I feel like, because that's what the service is for.
> Solely creating turtle or json-ld or whatever, which is cheaper to produce (and cheaper for the consumer) than constructing HTML+RDFa seems to be a fine option.
> It is as frictionless as possible.

I tend to agree if only the HTML template is expected to be different
per data shape. Otherwise, it is trivial to pump out a list of stuff in
HTML for all possible data.

> I have nothing against RDFa - I think it is great, and should probably receive more attention around these lists, but using it for machine to machine communication is not ideal, or, I think, what it is optimised for.
I think realistically speaking it depends on the weight of the resource
and whether it makes sense to serve it through a particular syntax. It
doesn't make a whole lot of sense to serve 100MB HTML+RDFa. That's not
going to be that interesting for the Web browser. It may be entertaining
for us to see what happens however :P So, I agree that if the
requirement is strictly about machine-machine communication, we can
optimise. But a reminder with the "RDF browser" for LON is that, it
takes the "data" and builds a view for a human user. So, that's
definitely not machine-machine, but human-machine communication.

> For me, Linked Data and the Semantic Web are about machine-to-machine communication, and RDFa embedded in HTML sort of assumes that there are humans around at every stage (not just start and finish, perhaps), and the objective is for machines to be better able to interpret what the human-oriented document is saying.
> That is not always the case.
I agree with the idea that it is about assisting humans with what
machines are generally good at, all towards a social effect.

Just to emphasise, the argument for RDFa is not about making that it is
the case for every scenario. All of the syntaxes materialised for
different needs. I'm content with that.

> It all depends whether you think the source format is RDF or HTML, I think.
> I think I may be starting to repeat my self ;-)
> 
> best
> Hugh
To me it is not about "RDF or HTML", which by the way, somewhat pins
HTML to not be able to include RDF - obviously it can. If you meant HTML
without embedded RDF, then okay, I would say that obviously HTML alone
is insufficient for machine information exchange at the granularity we want.

To me the bottom line is about the RDF language, the details - which
syntax - is merely about finding an ideal balance when designing the
system, that happens to be based on actual criteria as opposed to
hypothetical.

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

Received on Friday, 16 March 2018 21:02:58 UTC