RE: Understanding of JSON-LD values

On Thursday, June 13, 2013 12:01 PM, William Waites wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:28:28 +1000, Peter Ansell
> <ansell.peter@gmail.com> said:
> 
>     > advantage if all users send documents in a particular profile of
>     > JSON-LD, (and they must reference a particular @context in the
>     > case of Web Payments), which will encourage the current
>     > inefficient practice of creating data serialisations to match
>     > specific APIs rather than programming for reuse and longevity
>     > using only the RDF Abstract Model.
> 
> As I understand it, that's the point. JSON APIs work well because they
> don't generalise. That makes them easy to use, and that's why people
> use them. JSON-LD is supposed to give us a consistent way to interpret
> these documents as RDF if we're interested in abstract longevity --
> without imposing any extra drag on the normal web developers who just
> want to use simple dictionaries in a simple context.

Exactly, it doesn't force developers to change their JSON representations
overnight. It also doesn't force developers to use new tooling etc. They can
re-use all their existing tooling and build on investments they made in
their systems.


> Now if we can do that, we have the best of both worlds. I can write a
> little server API that does something, without worrying or thinking at
> all about how it fits into the bigger picture. People can use my
> service without having to get special tools. Then you can make a
> profile with instructions for how you think it should fit in and use
> specialised tools to work at the next level up.

Right. It makes a lot of sense to process the data as JSON-LD because it
means you can avoid a lot of code when dealing with multiple Web APIs e.g.
All of them will become uniform even if they weren't in the first place.


> I disagree with the strong de-emphasis on RDF in the JSON-LD
> specifications though. It should say something more like, "if you use
> JSON this way, it makes it possible to do all sorts of RDF semantic
> web stuff with it, in fact it *is* RDF -- that's pretty cool, but if
> you don't want to think about that, you don't have to".

  The document is primarily intended for the following audiences: [...]
  Software developers who want to generate or consume Linked Data,
  an RDF graph, or an RDF Dataset in a JSON syntax

  JSON-LD was designed to be usable by developers as idiomatic JSON,
  with no need to understand RDF [RDF11-CONCEPTS]. However, JSON-LD was
  also designed to be usable as RDF, so people intending to use JSON-LD
  with RDF tools will find it can be used like any other RDF syntax.
  Complete details of how JSON-LD relates to RDF are in C. Relationship
  to RDF.

  JSON-LD is a concrete RDF syntax as described in [RDF11-CONCEPTS].
  Hence, a JSON-LD document is both an RDF document and a JSON document
  and correspondingly represents both an instance of the RDF data model
  and an instance of the JSON-LD data model

[http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld/]



--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Thursday, 13 June 2013 10:40:34 UTC