Re: [JSON] Some general serialization "things"

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 13:44 +0000, Nathan wrote
> Just a note to say that there are many weird and wonderful options...

Indeed, and it reminded be of the big divide between Group C (who uses
libraries) and Groups A and B (who do not).   

Group C doesn't care as much about what the json looks like as Groups A
and B, but I'm sure they do care.  They want it to be (1) small, (2)
fast, and (3) easy to read by humans, for those rare times when they
need to think about what it actually looks like, eg in debugging [which
is rare, of course :-) ].    Your examples seem to suggest we can find
nice ways to optimize among these trade-offs.

In contrast, while Groups A and B do care about the above, they care
much more about how easy it is to write code to deal with this data.

Of course, you know this, Nathan -- you once went through and wrote
javascript snippets of how to do things with RDF in various styles,
which alas I can't find -- but I did want to point it out for the group.

In looking for that post of yours, I came across Jeni's great post [1]
where she quotes you as saying:

        You can’t shoe horn RDF in to JSON, no matter how hard you try -
        well, you can, but you loose all the benefits of JSON in the
        first place, because the data is RDF, triples and not objects,
        rdf nodes and not simple values
        
and then paraphrases it herself, as:

        In other words, using JSON as the basis for an RDF syntax
        doesn’t actually win you anything in terms of the ease of
        processing of that RDF. In fact, I’ll go further and say it has
        exactly the same bad qualities as RDF/XML.
        
... which several people in this WG have pointed out.  I wonder if we as
a group have consensus on this view, or there are other angles.

I think Manu disagrees, focusing on the greenbox and the trick of using
external mapping information.  The job of the shoehorn is much easier
when there are extra secret storage compartments.   (or maybe: stretchy
shoes.)

My vague sense is that we'll get the most benefit focusing on giving
json folks SPARQL results instead of RDF per se.  I think that addresses
most of the use cases more simply.   (And that may be out of scope for
this WG, but let's come back to that after we've figured what technology
standards would actually really help folks here.)

     -- Sandro

[1] http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/149

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 14:14:40 UTC