Re: A Quick Note on WebID history - Re: All the Agents Challenge (ATAC) at ISWC 2021

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 22:06, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
wrote:

> On 7/25/21 11:12 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> >
> > Yes, if you said to any web developer in the world, "JSON with URLs",
> > they'd get it immediately
>
> Yes, they do!
>
> I tend to phrase it as URLs as Data Source Names that resolve to content
> comprising any of the following:
>
> 1. JSON -- for EAV
> 2. CSV -- for N-Tuples representing a Table/Grid/Spreadsheet
>

Yes, JSON as EAV is great

So the issue with WebID is that it's almost unimplementable.  The reason is
that you are required to use turtle, which doesnt have a native parser, or
native user base.  It also struggles to handle any sort of arithmetic.

Then you need to correctly implement content negotiation which always
breaks something.  Almost no one can do it, even large firms

I say 'almost' because perhaps OpenLink is the best out there.  So, as a
quick experiment I just tried the two WebIDs in your profile:

1. time curl http://kingsley.idehen.net/public_home/kidehen/profile.ttl#i
Time taken: 8.52s
Result: a file in turtle, doesnt display in the browser

2. id.myopenlink.net/DAV/home/KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/kingsley.ttl#this
Time taken: 7.78s
Result: curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer

And I would say OpenLink are the very best out there, in middleware for
turtle etc.

Similarly, solid pods have major bugs in their WebiDs

Conclusion:  WebID as a means to facilitate profiles on the social web is
unimplementable.  I actually only just realized this today after about 10
years of observing all the different attempts to implement it, out there

An EAV solution with a familiar syntax (JSON), parser etc. as per schema.org
is what works and WebID needs to adapt to that (somehow)

Which of course is the approach of schema.org and a reason it's got major
traction as the de facto semantic web ...


>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Kingsley Idehen
> Founder & CEO
> OpenLink Software
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>
> Web Identities (WebID):
> Personal: http://kingsley.idehen.net/public_home/kidehen/profile.ttl#i
>         :
> http://id.myopenlink.net/DAV/home/KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/kingsley.ttl#this
>
>
>