Re: [JSON] Elephant in the room

On 03/23/2011 12:22 PM, Nathan wrote:
> Almost every developer I know, from enterprise to bedroom developers,
> work primarily with OO oriented languages, or key/value data structures
> in functional languages.
> 
> The primary *huge* issue here, is that most people can't work with
> triples and graphs without special tooling. Not to mention that it's
> highly unfamiliar to them.
> 
> Send an object with an id over the wire and people can use it, it's
> familiar, they "get it", send them a triple, and they're lost - even if
> they grok the graph and triple, they don't have the machinery to handle
> it often.
> 
> This is pretty much the sole reason that every developer I know outside
> of the sem web community does not use RDF in any way, even though they
> like the concepts and would like "linked data".

Yes, this is exactly it!

I think this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings that we are
having in this group. Richard posted a good visualization:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=json,rdf&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

Fundamentally, until there is a free, open source, GPLed triple store
that is performant, scales to billions of triples and provides an easy
to use API - RDF and SPARQL are going to stay roughly as popular as they
are right now. Until there is something to replace the 'M' in the LAMP
stack for RDF applications, we're not going to see a change in the way
Web developers develop.

For example, our company needs to store roughly 100 billion+ triples per
year of financial transaction data. We're currently using a home-built
MySQL solution for our storage mechanism, we will probably migrate to
MongoDB in time. We have no free, open source choice for storing this
information - nobody does. So the idea that the average web developer is
backed by a triple store is a terrible assumption to make. The only
thing that even remotely comes close to scaling for us is MongoDB and
MongoDB speaks JSON (specifically, BSON).

When you have a triple store and SPARQL, you tend to see the world
differently. Much of the world doesn't have a triple store, so they
don't share the world view that roughly half of this working group shares.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Payment Standards and Competition
http://digitalbazaar.com/2011/02/28/payment-standards/

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 16:50:45 UTC