Re: Vocabulary 'tutorial'?

hello elf.

On 2015-03-23 10:07, ☮ elf Pavlik ☮ wrote:
> On 03/23/2015 09:56 AM, Erik Wilde wrote:
>> i am wondering if/why semantic tooling would even be required. if we say
>> that AS2 is JSON-based, then there's no requirement to define new
>> vocabularies with RDF, correct? semantic tooling would be necessary for
>> those who *want* to use it, but that would be outside of AS's scope.
> If we design RDF Ontologies, those who want to use them as still JSON
> can do that thanks to JSON-LD. It comes with certain limitations but we
> can consider it a Lite mode which will not provide all the robust
> features. If we don't keep RDF in mind while designing, it may not work
> very well if someone wants to use more powerful features and treat it as
> Linked Data.

that's the point i've been trying to make, and decision we've been 
dancing around for a couple of months. is AS2 JSON-based, or is it 
RDF-based. saying that it's "JSON-LD based" really doesn't solve the 
problem, it simply provides rhetoric to justify our inability to decide.

>> the approach follows the idea of https://github.com/dret/sedola, which
>> has the same idea of providing a basic documentation harness (in the
>> case of sedola it's used for for media types, HTTP link headers and link
>> relation types), without forcing people to subscribe to a single
>> modeling framework that's required to formally describe these things.
> Could you please give an example of how those who want to treat it as
> Link Data can simply do so? Once again, we can not just say "we don't
> mind if you try to use it as Linked Data", but if we want to make it
> possible we must keep it in mind when we design things.

it all comes down to how things are defined. if we *require* all 
identifiers to be dereferencable, then we (probably) require people to 
publish RDF at those URIs. if one the other hand we treat identifiers as 
identifiers, then it is outside of the scope of AS2 if people decide to 
publish RDF at those URIs. if they do, they're welcome to do so, but if 
they don't, that's fine, too.

conflating the concepts of identifiers and links can be risky. if AS2 
says that concepts such as activity types and object properties are 
identifiers, then everything works just fine. if otoh AS2 says that 
those concepts must be treated as links, that's a very different design.

practically speaking, many linked data implementations treat core 
concepts as identifiers anyway, because otherwise the web would melt 
down under the constant load of implementations pulling in all 
interlinked concepts every time they encounter them, to check if they 
may have changed.

>> as an experiment, i have created sedola documentation for many W3C and
>> IETF specs, and despite the fact that these are using different (and
>> often no) formalisms, this still results in a useful list of the
>> concepts that matter:
>> * https://github.com/dret/sedola/blob/master/MD/mediatypes.md
>> * https://github.com/dret/sedola/blob/master/MD/headers.md
>> * https://github.com/dret/sedola/blob/master/MD/linkrels.md
> Looks cool! I guess meant for human consumption and not for machine
> processing?

so far i'm just publishing MD because it's easy and it's good to look 
at. it would be trivial to transform it into other metamodels, such as 
JSON, XML, or RDF.

wrt to human consumption vs machine consumption: machines can understand 
the concepts that have been defined somewhere, so that's already pretty 
useful. and that's really all there practically is, because the vast 
majority of meaningful concepts on the internet and the web today have 
only textual descriptions, so there's nothing to consume for machines 
other than a distilled list of the concepts defined in those specs.

cheers,

dret.

-- 
erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
            | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
            | http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |

Received on Monday, 23 March 2015 09:23:46 UTC