Re: What *is* RDF?

On Mar 25, 2011, at 10:43, William Waites wrote:

> * [2011-03-24 22:27:02 -0400] Peter Frederick Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> écrit:
> 
> ] Well, then do I have a solution for you!
> ]   The JSON for an RDF graph is an array of arrays, each of which has
> ]   three elements, each of which are strings.  Each of the three-element
> ]   arrays encodes a triple ... [You should be able to guess the rest.]
> ] Done!  Let's ratify this at the first F2F, declare victory, and be the
> ] first W3C WG in a long time to finish early.
> 
> This is not very far from what we see in terms of SPARQL results
> format and such today. Instead of a string, you have a small
> dictionary with type, value and maybe language and datatype keys if
> appropriate. It is valid JSON. It is incredibly inconvenient to work
> with.
> 
> Users of JSON, as I understand it, like their main objects to be
> (nested) dictionaries with simple keys.
> 
> They also like what could be called a "subject-oriented"
> representation where they can think in terms of a thing or object that
> has properties. The do not like dealing with tuples or
> statements. This is the impedance mismatch.


+1.  This is where we have a real choice to make.  If we can't create a JSON serialization for Web developers, then we might still create one for SemWebbers (but that alone would be much less useful).

It would be helpful to focus this discussion on whether we can create a subject-oriented nested dictionary with simple keys that represents (a useful subset of) RDF.

Regards,
Dave


> 
> -w
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> William Waites                <mailto:ww@styx.org>
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Received on Friday, 25 March 2011 15:06:30 UTC