Re: blank slate

On 8/5/2014 12:27, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
>
>
> On Aug 5, 2014 3:52 AM, "Holger Knublauch" <holger@topquadrant.com 
> <mailto:holger@topquadrant.com>> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 8/5/14, 11:23 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:
> >>
> >> Holger,
> >>
> >> Yes, your example is most likely understandable by anyone who does 
> some coding, without being a "semantic web engineer." Now the question 
> is: who creates this and how? And do they have to be fully versed in RDF?
> >
> > To be honest, I believe the modern reality is that people create 
> those things using copy and paste from sites such as StackOverflow. 
> And that's not necessarily bad, and we all do it. As long as the 
> common patterns are well documented snippets, nobody needs to 
> understand the formal underpinnings, and the syntax allows them to 
> ignore the attributes that they don't need. A good example of how to 
> present this is the schema.org <http://schema.org> documentation, 
> which includes copy-able snippets in various formats.
> >
> > And I like the analogy of a gateway "drug", because anyone who cares 
> to look deeper may have an easier path to understanding the RDF model 
> too. This is IMHO more useful than pretending that RDF was XML and use 
> RELAX-NG as the starting point.
>
> Assuming that this is a reference to ShEx, can you explain how it 
> pretends that RDF is XML?
>

ShEx doesn't explicitly mention XML apart from comparing it to XML 
Schema in the introduction of the primer. But the SHEXc syntax is 
modeled after RelaxNG Compact Syntax and users may therefore come to the 
conclusion that this is just a variation of XML (XML Schema). 
Furthermore, it has one dedicated Start rule that is comparable to the 
root of an XML document.

My concern is that we had this confusion before: When RDF and OWL were 
standardized, they came with RDF/XML syntax only, and people thought 
this semantic web is just another kind of XML. But a complicating kind 
of XML, where the idea of graphs was hidden behind rdf:ID and rdf:about 
attributes.

This is more about first impressions than rational facts.

Holger