Re: [JSON] Elephant in the room

  Hi,

Please see my comments inline.

On 3/23/2011 9:50 AM, Manu Sporny wrote:
> 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.

Hmmm. From what I see, RDF and SPARQL are a lot more popular than 3 years ago.

Fundamentally, I think it is not hard to a developer to be able to learn a bit RDF and
start consuming data in triples. It is not the same as requesting that developer to fully understand
graph modeling, semantics, etc.

It is just another data source.

Zhe

> 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
>

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 18:17:58 UTC