Re: A kind of farewell

Felix,
Thanks! :)

Jean-Pierre,
Yes, to be precise, we dropped *both* RDF *and* XML as a format for
knowledge representation, and it has nothing to do with RDF/XML the format.
(we kept XML in other areas however, such as document markup).
It's great that you have no problems with RDF conversions, and I'm
interested what tools you use.


Evain, Jean-Pierre <evain@ebu.ch> ezt írta (időpont: 2016. szept. 21., Sze,
10:23):

> Dear Bernat, Felix,
>
> of course gathering views and experience is good. I have completely
> different experience and I very happily use RDF triples, query via sparql
> and use results exported in JSON.
>
> Also not clear if it was RDF that was dropped (I think that's what is
> meant) orRDF-XML as a representation format. This in itself makes me think
> about the whole context behind the comments.
>
> We all come with a different history and we need to reflect experience in
> such a way that newcomers can make their own mind before being redirected
> based on specific developer experience.
>
> Jean-Pierre
> ________________________________
> From: Felix Sasaki [fsasaki@w3.org]
> Sent: 21 September 2016 09:56
> To: Bernát Kalló
> Cc: public-rax@w3.org
> Subject: Re: A kind of farewell
>
> Dear Bernat,
>
> it is  a pity to loose your contributions to this group. But even the
> below summary is very valuable and I think we should take that up in our
> wiki page. I share your view on developers and RDF, and agree with what
> write on json-ld.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Felix
>
> Am 20.09.2016 um 18:01 schrieb Bernát Kalló <bernat.kallo@z-bible.org
> <mailto:bernat.kallo@z-bible.org>>:
>
> Hello all,
>
> Unfortunately, it seems that I will not be able to contribute to the
> group, at least in the following 6 to 12 months.
>
> About two months ago we decided to stop using RDF+XML at z-Bible, and use
> YAML instead for knowledge representation. (As a small startup, it's easy
> for us to make such abrupt changes.)
>
> Here are my reasons why we dropped RDF+XML. (We talked with Christian that
> these could be included in the knowledge base of the group, and/or
> incorporated in the publication.)
>
> - RDF was invented around 1996, and still hasn't gained too much
> popularity.. I was wondering why. Now I think the main reason is the
> over-simplified data model (everything is triples). It sounds extremely
> elegant, but it turns out that even the simplest things become overly
> complicated because of this. For example, if I want to store an ordered
> list of objects (e.g. paragraphs of a text) and retreive them in order with
> SPARQL, I have to do crazy hacks. It was Manu Sporny's blog post<
> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/> that pointed me to this
> conclusion.
> - We use JavaScript, while I see most of you are using Java. In the Java
> world, it is quite common to use XML for configuration. In the JavaScript
> world, JSON is the de facto standard because it directly translates to
> plain old JavaScript data structures. (We chose YAML as a human-friendly
> syntax for JSON, but basically we use the JSON data model.)
> - While we were using XML, we had to write importer code for each of our
> XML-based file types (I was planning to solve this with an XML>RDF
> conversion..) Now with YAML, we just import the data and use it, no extra
> conversion code is needed. Though both technologies have advantages, for us
> as a startup, the ability to make fast changes is the most important, so
> YAML works better for us.
> - And there is no decent SPARQL implementation for JavaScript. The only
> one is quite buggy, and does not give good syntax error messages. So it
> seemed that our editor colleagues will not be able to cope with it. It was
> also way too slow for our purposes.
>
> For the future, I have some thoughts:
>
> JSON-LD was created fairly recently and it has already gained a relatively
> wide popularity (it is the recommended LD format by Google<
> https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data>,
> for example.) For its designers, it took several years of hard work, but I
> think it was worth it, beacuse the world got a more user-friendly format,
> and it helps the RDF/Semantic Web ecosystem move forward. Similarly, there
> is space for developing more usable, more user-friendly formats for other
> parts of the RDF world. And I think you guys now have the opportunity to
> design something nice. So I wish you the best in this.
>
> We plan to develop a format for knowledge to document (e.g. RDF to XML)
> conversion. However, now we might end up with one of the (hunderds of)
> JavaScript template engines out there and not use RDF at all. But if later
> we happen to come back to a Semantic Web direction, I'll most probably come
> back to this group.
>
> But I'm thankful to you all, I have got some quite important insights in
> this group. And it was a pleasure to work with you.
>
> I wish you blessed work and nice results!
>
> Bernát
>
>
>
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