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

On 7/25/21 4:32 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 at 22:06, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com
> <mailto: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.


You are conflating two things when you make that statement:

1. WebID -- a resolvable identifier that identifies and Person or Agent
2. WebID-TLS -- a protocol that extends TLS by using a WebID as a
pointer to a credentials doc (WebID-Profile Doc) that's reconciled to
the Public Key used to establish a TLS session.

I believe you are stating that the protocol above (WebID-TLS) has
implementation challenges arising from the manner in which User Agents
handle TLS sessions.


> The reason is that you are required to use turtle, which doesnt have a
> native parser, or native user base. 


That only applies in a world where WebID and Turtle are tightly-coupled.
That isn't the world I see (past, present, or future).


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

curl -kI
https://id.myopenlink.net/DAV/home/KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/kingsley.ttl#this
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Virtuoso/08.03.3322 (Linux) x86_64-generic-linux-glibc25  VDB
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 01:31:29 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Allow: COPY, DELETE, GET, HEAD, LOCK, MKCOL, MOVE, OPTIONS, PATCH, POST,
PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, PUT, TRACE, UNLOCK
Vary: Accept-Encoding, Access-Control-Request-Headers, Origin
MS-Author-Via: DAV, SPARQL
Accept-Patch: application/sparql-update
*Accept-Post: text/turtle, text/n3, text/nt, text/html, application/ld+json*
Link: <http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#Resource>; rel="type"
Link: <http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#NonRDFSource>; rel="type"
Link:
<https://id.myopenlink.net/DAV/home/KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/kingsley.ttl,meta>;
rel="describedby"
Link: <?p=1>; rel="first"
Link: <?p=1>; rel="last"
Link:
<https://id.myopenlink.net/DAV/home/KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/kingsley.ttl,meta>;
rel="meta"; title="Metadata File"
ETag: "4c2d0dee687e042f34aaa9214d5b7730"
X-SPARQL-default-graph:
http://id.myopenlink.net/DAV/home/KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/kingsley.ttl
Content-disposition: filename=sparql_2021-07-26_01-31-29Z.ttl
Content-Type: text/turtle
Content-Length: 19817

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


We are passionately committed to data de-silo-fication which means as
commitment to content-negotiation and the like. Data transformation is
our calling, and the very heart and soul of the company :)


>
> Similarly, solid pods have major bugs in their WebiDs
>
> Conclusion:  WebID as a means to facilitate profiles on the social web
> is unimplementable.


An resolvable identifier is what's workable. For those committed to
HTTP, WebID is workable.


>   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 <http://schema.org> is what works and WebID needs to adapt
> to that (somehow)


You can implement a protocol based on the same logic that underlies
WebID-TLS using other resolvable identifiers and JSON-based profile
documents. Unfortunately, this simple solution is hard for many to
accept and understand, for reasons I struggle to understand.


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


Schema.org offers a general purpose vocabulary supported by Google.
Thus, any sane Web Master and/or Content Manager would be remiss to
ignore it.

Anyway, schema.org provides enough terms definitions to implementing the
WebID-TLS protocol, we've actually implemented support for that years
ago too.


-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen       
Founder & CEO 
OpenLink Software   
Home Page: http://www.openlinksw.com
Community Support: https://community.openlinksw.com
Weblogs (Blogs):
Company Blog: https://medium.com/openlink-software-blog
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Data Access Drivers Blog: https://medium.com/openlink-odbc-jdbc-ado-net-data-access-drivers

Personal Weblogs (Blogs):
Medium Blog: https://medium.com/@kidehen
Legacy Blogs: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/
              http://kidehen.blogspot.com

Profile Pages:
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/kidehen
Google+: https://plus.google.com/+KingsleyIdehen/about
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen

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