- From: Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>
- Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:18:24 +0000
- To: semantic-web@w3.org, public-rdf-comments@w3.org
I'm not talking about benchmarking in terms of "how fast?" but in terms of "how easy?". There are a number of different ways of encoding RDF in JSON, with specifications at various different levels of maturity. This is a simple benchmark to compare how easy they are to work with: In your favourite programming language, given an object representing the deserialised form of a JSON file, encoded to the specification being tested, write a function "name_for_homepage" which takes a URL, finds which person (or organisation, etc - I don't care about the rdf:type triple) has that URL as their foaf:homepage, and return that person's name. Sometimes there will be more than one person with the same homepage, or they'll have multiple names. If so, just return a single arbitrary result. If there are no results, return null. For example, using Talis' RDF/JSON, and Perl, and assuming $data holds the deserialized data, we can write the function as follows: sub name_for_homepage { # Perl's idiom for function arguments my ($homepage) = @_; # Pseudo-constants my $FOAF_HOMEPAGE = 'http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/homepage'; my $FOAF_NAME = 'http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name'; # Examine each predicate-object list RESOURCE: foreach my $po_list (values %{$data}) { # Skip over resources with no foaf:name next RESOURCE unless exists $po_list->{$FOAF_NAME}; # Skip over resources which don't have the right homepage URI next RESOURCE unless grep { $_->{value} eq $homepage and $_->{type} eq 'uri' } @{ $po_list->{$FOAF_HOMEPAGE} || [] }; # Return the zeroth foaf:name return $data->{$subject}{$FOAF_NAME}[0]{'value'}; } # No success. return undef; } Pretty simple. The problem with many proposed RDF in JSON serialisations is that they try to make the JSON look pretty at the expense of processing simplicity. For example, add CURIES, and then consumers have to add code that expands them. Use nested objects for bnodes, and suddenly the code to crawl the structure becomes a lot more complex. So my challenge to other JSON serialisations is to make name_for_homepage simpler (or at least not require it to become any more complex). Are there any contenders? -- Toby A Inkster <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
Received on Saturday, 12 November 2011 15:18:26 UTC