Re: JSON-LD - Universal Linked Data markup for Web Services

Hi Manu,

On May 30, 2010, at 23:33 , Manu Sporny wrote:
> Would this WG be amenable to publishing this spec as a FPWD (after about
> another month or two of work on it)? It deals with representing Web-wide
> objects between User Agents and Web Services. It is geared as a
> standards-based replacement of SOAP... REST + JSON-LD.

I don't want to speak for this WG, and I'd rather we looked more closely at technology before thinking about publication. I think we ought to point out that rechartering WebApps isn't the easiest thing ever, so that adding deliverables might prove tricky no matter what.

More constructively, I have two very quick comments:

  - This is an interesting project, but I don't think that you want to set out with the goal of producing a replacement for SOAP. You want your goal to be something like the exchange of semantically rich information using JSON that addresses the needs of a large segment of the Web community. If it helps bring SOAP to the horrible death it so dearly deserves, fine, but that's a side-effect.

  - Your approach is built on the idea of encoding RDF or RDF-like models into JSON. That has the downside of requiring people who already have and use JSON-based exchange systems to change their data. Experience tends to show that that's rarely a very popular option. Have you considered taking a more GRDDL-like road and providing a way to map existing JSON to a richer, more contextualised semantic model? This has the double advantage that 1) people can keep their JSON as is, and 2) if a data source doesn't want to perform that mapping, you can do it for them and everyone's happy (it's never been about "evolution" versus "revolution", only about what strategy you have to introduce new technology without being smothered by the gargantuan laziness that's inherent in any decoupled system). I'd recommend taking a good look at JSON Schema in this context. Notably, they've been adding ways of mapping simple values to links from the schema, and those links can be typed (as in @rel). I haven't gone through the motions, but I think that this gives you a lot of power in mapping JSON to something RDFy.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/

Received on Monday, 31 May 2010 10:41:29 UTC