Re: Cycles

On 8/26/11 3:30 AM, Dan Brickley wrote:
> On 25 August 2011 01:23, Ian Davis<ian.davis@talis.com>  wrote:
>> Perhaps a little light relief :)
>>
>> I came across this after Danny Ayers linked to one of his
>> contributions to the thread.
>>
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2002Nov/0003.html
>>
>> Best read by squinting so the letters X,M,L look like J,S,O,N
> Well, quite.
>
> The RDF community has a distressing tendency towards syntax-envy,
> always looking jealously at the greater adoption levels enjoyed by
> other syntaxes. Unfortunately the issue will never be fixed by making
> (some version of) RDF look more like the most currently fashionable
> data syntax. Our problems are deeper: XML and JSON can be prettier
> because that's all there is to them. Unlike RDF, they're not a mapping
> from a concrete syntax to a different, invisible, abstract data-model.
> Sure there are canonical abstractions (Infoset/DOM etc.), but there is
> not the same mis-match between how-it-looks and how-it-works that RDF
> tends to bring to the table.
>
> The idea of pushing work into syntactic-schema annotations has been
> around almost as long a RDF, but never caught on. Our only
> standards-track effort in that direction, GRDDL, doesn't seem widely
> loved (although
> http://search.cpan.org/~tobyink/JSON-GRDDL-0.001_00/lib/JSON/GRDDL.pm
> remains intriguing).
>
> While we can always do more work to improve things on the syntax
> front, I feel it's often used as an excuse for deeper, subtler
> problems that face RDF adoption, and that some more careful
> investigations into RDF usability might repay the investment.
>
> In http://www.slideshare.net/danbri/when-presentation-849447 I touched
> on three mini post-mortems for situations where RDF was used and
> rejected, or where we'd have expected it to be used, and it wasn't. In
> none of those situations was syntactic elegance a major consideration;
> rather, it was working with RDF 'as RDF' and its available tooling
> that caused the problems. RDF tools continue to improve, but even if
> we come up with the most beautiful and elegant XML^H^H^HJSON syntax
> for encoding RDF, there's much more to working with RDF than merely
> parsing it.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>
+1000



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Kingsley Idehen 
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
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