Re: [ANN] Linked Data Templates: First draft and Call for participation

Kingsley, Alfredo,

I could mention many reasons why we haven't reused Swagger or a different
API description format: 1) it's not RDF 2) it's not an ontology 3) no
standard way to embed SPARQL 4) depends explicity on HTTP etc.

Most importantly, Swagger is only a description, while LDT not only
provides a description, but also a method to evaluate that description in
order to produce a response [1]. So LDT ontology is more like a definition
of an API, rather than a description. I'm not aware of any other spec that
provides this kind of evaluation. You could compare it to SPARQL algebra
[2].

It's not that we decided one day that the world needs one more API
description format. No, LDT has evolved over many years of building SPARQL-
and Linked Data-native systems. Since it's useful to us, we think that by
extension it could be useful for other people working on such software.

[1] https://atomgraph.github.io/Linked-Data-Templates/#http-valuation
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/#sparqlAlgebra

On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 6:54 PM, Alfredo Serafini <seralf@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Kingsely and all
>
> I agree with this:
>
>
>> Have you considered using OpenAPI (nee Swagger) to document your APIs?
>> Doing that would provide another point of intersection between "Web
>> Developers" and "Semantic Web Developers" .
>>
>>
>> [1] https://medium.com/openlink-software-blog/swagger-the-api-ec
>> onomy-rest-linked-data-and-a-semantic-web-9d6839dae65a -- Swagger, the
>> API Economy, REST, Linked Data, and a Semantic Web
>>
>>
> moreover I would guess that approaching to API design as a collaborative
> effort (even before providing the actual underling implementation) could be
> a way to deepen the discussion.
> The community could be interested in merging approaches and best
> practices, as Kingsley said, avoiding choices that could be problematic on
> one of the side (for example opaque URI,, and so on...).
> Given the current status of stadards, with LDP, LDF, it would be useful to
> underline in a practical manner the benifits of a "new" standard around
> resources. For example for some reason I imagine some similarities with the
> ideas behind the "old" Fresnel approach in some way (at least when
> reading/navigating a resource) here (am I completely wrong?), but maybe I
> didn't understand at all the context :-) Engaging people around playable
> wip examples could be a way to focus on the crucial parts.
>
>
> my
>
>
>