Re: Coherent (modern) definition of RWW

On 18 May 2021 at 17:20:51, Kingsley Idehen (kidehen@openlinksw.com) wrote:
> On 5/18/21 4:26 AM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > Quoting Kingsley Idehen (2021-05-17 23:26:33)
> >> On 5/17/21 11:37 AM, Martynas Jusevičius wrote:
> >>> LDP is a poor protocol period.
> > I guess that's "Linked Data Platform 1.0": https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/
> >
> > Write is done using WebDAV extensions to HTTP:
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data_Platform#LDP_and_WebDAV_relationship  
> >
> > Seems the main benefit of LDP is that publishers can host RDF data on
> > legacy non-RDF systems - likely adequate and efficient for large bulks
> > of data.
>  
> In my experience, as an implementor of said protocol, LDP addresses the
> fact that data may live in a file within a file system i.e., your
> conventional file and folder setup. Thus, you can perform the following
> operations:
>  
> 1. Create a Folder
>  
> 2. Delete a Folder
>  
> 3. Add a File to a Folder
>  
> 4. Delete a File from a Folder
>  
> 5. Add content to a file, using a variety of content-types
>

I think that is my biggest issue with LDP. It is too specific, and does not represent the web as a graph of resources. In other words, the web is not a filesystem. That is an outdated mindset IMO, which might have worked with early web but hardly applies anymore.

Graph Protocol on the other hand is overly simplistic and possibly hard to use for domain-specific cases. But most of all, it is so centred on Named Graphs being pushed to the topmost interface. This is not a good choice for a general-purpose RWW.

Hydra on the other hand can be flexible enough to describe LDP as well as Graph Protocol, if one so wishes. Importantly though, it favours rich semantic description of resources, which allow tailoring a Read/Write web interface to a domain-specific problem. 

By building on top of RESTful HTTP it would be easier to appeal to teams not well versed in RDF, with the starting point being familiar stack. That is the direction I would propose, rather than going for a one-size-fits-all solution, which will not be useful for the general public and thus slow (even slower) to adopt.

Tom

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2021 16:14:47 UTC