JSON-LD Telecon Minutes for 2012-10-02

Thanks to Niklas for scribing! The minutes from today's call are now
available here:

http://json-ld.org/minutes/2012-10-02/

Full text of the discussion follows including a link to the audio
transcript:

--------------------
JSON-LD Community Group Telecon Minutes for 2012-10-02

Agenda:
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-linked-json/2012Sep/0022.html
Topics:
   1. ISSUE-160: Specify property-generator round-tripping
      algorithm
   2. Microdata to JSON-LD conversion
   3. JSON-LD in Drupal 8
Chair:
   Manu Sporny
Scribe:
   Niklas Lindström
Present:
   Niklas Lindström, Manu Sporny, Markus Lanthaler, Lin Clark,
   Gregg Kellogg, David I. Lehn, Stéphane Corlosquet
Audio:
   http://json-ld.org/minutes/2012-10-02/audio.ogg

Niklas Lindström is scribing.
Manu Sporny:  Two additions to the agenda: talk about the
   connect/graphify mechanism
   … and the microdata/json to json-ld topic
   … we'll add those to the end of the agenda

Topic: ISSUE-160: Specify property-generator round-tripping algorithm

Manu Sporny: https://github.com/json-ld/json-ld.org/issues/160
Manu Sporny: Current proposal is here:
   https://github.com/json-ld/json-ld.org/issues/160#issuecomment-8956476
Manu Sporny:  had a good discussion with Lin about this recently.
   We may have a new angle/proposal for this.
   … the big problem with this issue is that it creates new data
   … when expanding, and re-compacting, it's not clear how to get
   back to the original data
   … the idea that came up was that we could tag the generated
   data to make clear where it came from
   … thus recompaction knows how to *re*compact
   … I like this mostly because there's linear time complexity
   … downsides are: we're now generating instructions to the
   processor
   … and it is not a general solution in the sense that
   non-tagged multiple occurrences will not be compacted even if
   there is a property generator expression for a term in the
   context
   … so the question is: do we want this kind of tagged data?
   … If we decide that we want to take this path, we can apply
   this to the language maps as well (and other forms of syntactic
   sugar in the future)
Markus Lanthaler:  Do we want to include such metadata in the
   expanded output? Some systems may publish expanded data. If the
   metadata isn't there, users wanting to use property generators in
   compact contexts, they won't work.
Markus Lanthaler:  I'm also unsure about the use cases Drupal
   has. Can type coercion work for that?
Lin Clark:  I checked with the community. We cannot rely on
   gzip-ing for reducing bandwidth
Lin Clark:  Regarding type coercions: we don't know if those will
   have different types.
   … The people defining the fields aren't necessarily
   developers. So this is beyond our control.
Markus Lanthaler:  but you could generate a type based on the
   field names automatically..
Lin Clark:  We want to expose the type that people say things
   are.
Manu Sporny:  to clarify; the issue is that two different sites
   have different kinds of properties that share a common schema.org
   property?
Markus Lanthaler: This shows how using different types would
   work: https://bitly.com/U0Qo87
Niklas Lindström:  This is kinda like the RDFa vocabulary
   expansion feature. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Niklas Lindström:  I think that people will need this feature in
   JSON-LD - the property generator stuff. In all of these cases,
   the important property is the first property in the array. If we
   include this, we could specify something along those lines.
   Property generators aren't a general feature, they're a feature
   for those who cannot use entailment. It's a dirty solution w/ a
   practical use case. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Niklas Lindström:  I think we should clearly mark the
   metadata-in-expanded-form would be okay with me if we were clear
   about the issues. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Gregg Kellogg:  my thought was to use the spirit of entailment,
   in order to define the property generator array to be a list of
   properties for which the stated term as a subproperty
   relationship
   … so when we expand, we only use the single id of that
   property
   … if we just stick with a single iri for the @id, but include
   a property generator array as well
   … and we could add a flag to turn on using that to use those
   properties as well
   … I'd rather do that than add pragma data to the expanded
   output
Gregg Kellogg:  on compaction, the extra properties in the
   generator expression could be removed; unless they are also
   defined elsewhere..
Manu Sporny:  and we could have rules for treating presence of an
   iri both in a generator expression and regular term as an error
Lin Clark:  one of our cases is the ability to expand and then
   compact again
   …. although going back to compacted form is more theoretical
   for us
Lin Clark:  a number of the suggestions proposed will probably
   work for us
Markus Lanthaler: I meant instead of having "term": { "@id":
   ["http://example.org/vocab#term1",
   "http://example.org/vocab#term2" ]} in the context
Markus Lanthaler: we could have "term": { "@id":
   "http://example.org/vocab#term1", "@expandAlsoTo":
   "http://example.org/vocab#term2" ]}
David I. Lehn: hmm...
Markus Lanthaler: in compaction we would then just use @id, i.e.,
   expandAlsoTo is completely ignored in compaction
Gregg Kellogg:  instead of direct expansion, we can output a
   subPropery-assertion for the property
Markus Lanthaler:  yeah, that would work for us. we will always
   have at least one unique IRI for the term [scribe assist by Lin
   Clark]
Gregg Kellogg:  in my proposal, that'd result in term1
   rdfs:subPropertyOf term2
Manu Sporny: {"@context": {"compactor": {"@id":
   "http://bar.com/baz", "@expandAlsoTo":
   ["http://schema.org/title", "http://example.com/a"]},
   "http://schema.org/title": "foo"}
Markus Lanthaler: @expandAlsoTo is ignored in compaction
Gregg Kellogg: {"@id": "http://bar.com/baz",
   "rdfs:subPropertyOf": "http://schema.org/title"}
Niklas Lindström:  what are the consumer demands here?
Manu Sporny:  do the consumers expect to see schema.org/title in
   the expanded form here?
   … or is the need just for semantic annotation
Gregg Kellogg:  not really reinventing. It's more like what we do
   in RDFa.
Manu Sporny:  the downside is that you need to reason on the
   graph.
Lin Clark:  we want to communicate with multiple different
   consumers using different vocabularies
   … and also e.g. content staging...
   … we want to use ison-ld instead of RDF but with the full irri
Gregg Kellogg:  so then we need to expand this
Markus Lanthaler:  do we need to be able to undo that?
Gregg Kellogg:  if we don't perform generator expansion we don't
   need to undo anything
   … if you perform expansion you shouldn't expect to be able to
   undo it
Niklas Lindström:  I may have gotten a clear picture from what
   Gregg said... we have to consider the entire use case... when do
   we need to throw away the generated data? If we have property
   generators, on expansion, do they always generate the extra data
   (or do you need a flag to do that?) [scribe assist by Manu
   Sporny]
Niklas Lindström:  When you use compaction on expanded data, do
   you throw away something? Any full IRI that is used only in a
   property generator? Other alternative is to have the pragma
   directive. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Niklas Lindström:  Actually see if all of the statements are the
   same? That is use the heavily computation intensive mechanism.
   [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  if we do have a flag, we have the roundtripping
   issue
Manu Sporny:  i think we need to support roundtripping
   … I don't want that to be computation expensive. If we have
   pragmas we can do it cheaply.
Manu Sporny:  throwing away iris within property generators is
   ambiguous because it may not have come from expansion.
Markus Lanthaler: that's *the* question I would say niklas
Gregg Kellogg:  when expanding, if we have a property generators,
   bnodes *must* have node-id:s since the expanded properties link
   to the *same* bnode
   … and thus we can compact and compare values
Manu Sporny:  assigning bnodes requires graph normalization
Manu Sporny:  a drupal site might export and re-import via
   expanded form
Markus Lanthaler:  but that system can ignore data not relevant
   for it
Lin Clark:  the direction of the api is unclear for me
   … if the idea is that you will round-trip, we want to be able
   to use it
Niklas Lindström:  {ctx; {term: {id: [a, b]}, term: {label:
   'unknown'}} } expands to [{a: {@id: "_:genid-1", {b: {@id:
   "_:genid-1"}}, {@id: "_:genid-1", label: 'unknown'}]
Markus Lanthaler:
   https://github.com/json-ld/json-ld.org/issues/160#issuecomment-8956476
Markus Lanthaler: { "@context": { "property":
   "http://schema.org/foo" } }
Manu Sporny: What I'm proposing is something like this -
   {"@value": "foo", "@processor": "drop-when-compacting"}, not that
   terrible, I don't think. Problem is that re-compacting with a
   different context could lose data.
Markus Lanthaler:  compacting with processor pragmas and a new
   context seems problematic
Manu Sporny:  can we create a bnode mechanism that is easily
   identified?
Gregg Kellogg:  when expanding a property generator term, all
   iris:s associated with the generator are repeated for them. If a
   value is a bnode without @id, an @id must be generated for that
   to ensure that the same bnode is referenced more than once.
   …. when we compact, upon checking a term match for a term
   using property generators, we must compare the values to see if
   we have the same value. If all are the same, use the property
   generator term.
Niklas Lindström:  Can we just say that we use the node
   definition for the first item in the array, and references for
   the other items in the array. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Markus Lanthaler:  if you get an expanded document where iris
   used in non-normalized node definitions, would a property
   generator matching algorithm miss something?
Gregg Kellogg:  I'll write down a proposal
Manu Sporny:  so backing up, do we still want to support property
   generators? Lin and I think they're important.
Niklas Lindström: +1 with some faith
Manu Sporny:  we have two approaches, both *may* destroy data in
   edge cases upon compaction
Markus Lanthaler:  still, do we really have to eliminate the
   data?
   … it would make it much, much simpler
Gregg Kellogg:  then we wouldn't roundtrip
Manu Sporny:  Okay, so we have consensus that we want to support
   property generators and we want to support round-tripping. There
   is concerns that we don't want to inject pragma directives into
   expanded form.

Topic: Microdata to JSON-LD conversion

Gregg Kellogg:  we've discussed off-list about the possibility to
   take the json generated by a microdata parser and treat it as
   json-ld
   … the crux is that md-json contains a "properties" term which
   means nothing; so we'd need to "fold that upwards"
   … we'd need something like a "properties": {@container:
   "@fold"} to be able to do this.
Gregg Kellogg: Example of microdata+json:
   http://tinyurl.com/9n45rs5
Niklas Lindström:  We have seen this requirement before, the
   ability to keep processing if a particular key is found, but has
   no semantic meaning.
Manu Sporny:  the further we delay 1.0 to accommodate these new
   features, the higher the risk is that we lose current adopters of
   the api. I'm very concerned about this, I'd rather that we add
   features like this in extension specs and see what the market
   uptake for it is.
Gregg Kellogg:  I'm concerned about that as well.
Manu Sporny:  We could just add an API method - .fromMicrodata()
   - it's not declarative (which is bad), but it could be done in
   parallel to JSON-LD 1.0 going to REC. [scribe assist by Manu
   Sporny]

Topic: JSON-LD in Drupal 8

Markus Lanthaler: Just saw Lin's post about integrating JSON-LD
   into Drupal 8: http://groups.drupal.org/node/258778
Niklas Lindström:  Great!
Stéphane Corlosquet: yeah we even manage to get a bit of funding
   to help with the integration of JSON-LD in Drupal, hopefully that
   will speed things up.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: HTML5 and RDFa 1.1
http://manu.sporny.org/2012/html5-and-rdfa/

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2012 20:11:32 UTC