[wbs] response to 'Call for Review: JSON-LD Working Group Charter'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'Call for Review:
JSON-LD Working Group Charter' (Advisory Committee) for FactsMission by Reto
Gmür.


The reviewer's organization suggests changes to this Charter, and only
supports the proposal if the changes are adopted [Formal Objection].

Additional comments about the proposal:
   We would like to see JSON-LD better aligned with the RDF specification
suite. JSON-LD speaks mainly about serializing "Linked Data", which doesn't
seem to match the definition of Linked Data used elsewhere (as collection
of interrelated web accessible datasets). Rather than introducing the new
concept of "Linked Data Graph" and then somewhere stating that this is a
"generalized representation of a RDF graph as defined in [RDF-CONCEPTS]"
JSON-LD should not duplicate the concepts of RDF but leverage the RDF
abstractions and be a concise definition of an RDF Concrete Syntax. When
compared with other syntaxes, JSON-LD has advantages (like integration with
JSON tools) and disadvantages (like memory expensive parsing without
streaming), the specification should be explicit about this, as to allow
developers to make the best choice of syntax.

We know this goes against the narrative that RDF is too complicated and
that the (mystical) "average developer" only understands JSON. However we
believe this to be a short sighted strategy and that this only seemingly
improves acceptance of Linked Data technologies while failing to
sustainability promote the development of the web. If the "average
developer" doesn't understand and doesn't use the higher abstractions they
won't really benefit from the development. Luring them into producing RDF
by giving them a shiny syntax without actually educating about the
underlying concepts, only apparently fosters adoption (it didn't work with
RDF/XML and RSS 1.0). In the longer term, developers are likely to drop the
overhead as this brings them no tangible advantage.This is especially true,
since the most important consumers of JSON-LD don't actually parse JSON-LD
but expect a specific JSON that happens to also be parsable as JSON-LD.
Chances are that developers will drop JSON keys like @context as they are
ignored by the consumers anyway and produce plain JSON rather than
JSON-LD.

Summary of proposed change: charter the goal to remove conceptual
duplication, and to provide an honest comparison of JSON-LD with other
concrete syntaxes. Where the RDF concepts and documents are considered too
complex, improvements to the respective documents should be suggested.


The reviewer's organization:
   - intends to review drafts as they are published and send comments.
   - intends to develop experimental implementations and send experience
reports.
   - intends to apply this technology in our operations.


Comments about the deliverables:
   We have developed a parser for a subset of JSON-LD as no existing
compliant JSON-LD parser was able to to parse documents of around one GB of
size.


Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/jsonld-charter-201803/ until
2018-04-29.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2018 09:18:07 UTC