Re: Friendly JSON serialization (Was: Annotation Serializations)

On 23 Jan 2014, at 07:51 , Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi, Karen, folks–
> 
> I'll admit, I didn't have those folks in mind, but that's a real-world case: the casual maintainers. I know plenty of smart non-programmer folks at non-tech organizations who are tasked with just these sorts of issues. And it would be nice if understanding this all were easier for them.
> 
> But even a step up from that, full-time web developers, will struggle with obscure constructs or terms.
> 
> Rob's new vocabulary and mapping is great; it's pretty much just what I was asking for. (I won't quibble now about the few terms I'd change.)
> 
> I don't know enough about the RDF community to know if standardizing around these new terms for all contexts would be tolerable; I'm sympathetic to Waleed's viewpoint, and think 2 different sets of terms is asking for trouble, but since I'm not going to be the one consuming the RDF, I don't feel qualified to judge.

Well, to put on my RDF hat: there are two ways to do that, each having its downsides

- we change the whole of OA by using these new terms. That would mean that the OA CG will burn me on the stake:-)... more seriously, this means changing the namespace altogether in an OA2. There are long religious discussions among vocabulary folks on what the right naming of terms may be; but, in this case, if we decide that usability is more important than purity, then this may become the most important guiding principle.

Caveat: in fact, when using OA, we use a number of terms that are not in the OA vocabulary (foaf is the obvious example). Ie, this is not a complete solution

- we could define a new vocabulary by duplicating all terms and, for RDF processors, we'd put a bunch of owl:samePropertyAs, owl:sameClass, etc, statements. An RDF+OWL RL (or more) environment could make the bridges to the real OA, for those who do not care, well, they don't. In this case, some people of the SW community would burn me on the stake by unnecessarily duplicating the terms out there.

Logical consequence: I am burnt on the stake:-)

Note that all this is necessary for a possible RDFa mapping only. JSON-LD does not need anything new, the @context mechanism takes care of it. If, as discussed in another thread, we talk about a mapping of OA onto schema.org, then we would get close to solution #2 anyway. So maybe those two issues are related...

Ivan



> 
> Regards-
> -Doug
> 
> On 1/22/14 3:06 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>> I hope I'm not over-interpreting Ed's, Ivan's and Doug's points, but
>> _I'd_ summarize the point as this: that for a standard to be widely
>> adopted, it needs to be as easy to learn and implement as HTML and/or a
>> WordPress or Drupal module. In fact, the latter two would be excellent
>> tools if such is possible.
>> 
>> I work with a number of small organizations, mostly archives, that not
>> only do not have a programmer on staff, but do not have an "actual" web
>> master. Instead, once a web site is set up (usually by a consultant) it
>> is then maintained as needed by someone on staff who has learned just
>> enough to keep things running. Yet these organizations have unique
>> collections that could be of great value if linked.
>> 
>> kc
>> 
>> On 1/22/14, 10:30 AM, Edward Summers wrote:
>>> On Jan 22, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> So, did you have any examples of what is useful or not useful from a
>>>> tool perspective?  Everything in the current data model is based on
>>>> use cases and requirements, perhaps not requirements for everyone,
>>>> but requirements none-the-less.
>>> 
>>> Nope, I was just writing to agree that (more?) library support for
>>> working with OA annotations is an important idea. Just saying that
>>> some data is in JSON doesn’t mean it’s useful for a particular task.
>>> It just means you can call JSON.parse on it (yay) instead of having to
>>> install some esoteric RDF toolkit to work with it (boo).
>>> 
>>> //Ed
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
GPG: 0x343F1A3D
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf