Re: Turtle and JSON-LD Matter

On 07/16/2014 12:06 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> On 7/16/14 10:23 AM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>> Hi Kingsley,
>>
>>> >Is there any reason why Turtle and JSON-LD cannot be on equal 
>>> footing in regards to the WebID spec?
>>> >
>>> >There's no reason why WebID-Profile documents MUST be comprised of 
>>> RDF content in Turtle Notation.
>> In general, several W3C specs demand the presence of a specific RDF 
>> representation.
>> (Linked Data Platform, R2RML, …)
>>
>> Seems indeed quite contradictory… why did we invent RDF in the first 
>> place?:-)
>
> Exactly the question that hits me in the head every time I look at an 
> RDF language (system of signs, syntax, and semantics) based spec that 
> prefers a specific notation via MUST.
>
>
>>
>> On the other hand, I see some necessity for interoperability, but still…
>
> Interoperability isn't lost via Turtle and JSON-LD support in WebID-* 
> .  In fact, we increase interoperability via proper use of RDF and 
> AWWW  :-)
>
>

Imagine we have six different servers.  Each of them is publishing RDF 
in a W3C Recommended way.
Server 1 provides only Turtle.  Server 2 provides only RDF/XML. Server 3 
provides only n-quads.  Server 4 provides only JSON-LD. Server 5 
provides only RDFa.    And just for good measure, server 6 provides only 
a custom format, but includes a transformation to RDF/XML via GRDDL.

In this world, everyone is following W3C Recommendations, but now every 
client has to implement 5 RDF parsers plus a GRDDL transformation engine.

To me that seems like a huge blow to interoperability.   How many 
clients are really going to do that, and do it properly?

If instead, everyone just published in Turtle, then clients would only 
need to know how to read Turtle.  That would make it so much easier to 
join the fun.

Within LDP, the current compromise is every server MUST handle Turtle 
(so clients can get by knowing only Turtle), and every server SHOULD 
ALSO handle JSON-LD (so most clients can probably get by knowing only 
JSON-LD).     Had JSON-LD been adopted slightly sooner, we probably 
would have said MUST on both.

But LDP assumes a fairly smart server which knows about RDF.    To me 
that seems like rather a high burden for WebID publishers.    If you 
want MUST on both, then you're forcing everyone who's doing this by hand 
to be able to do Con-Neg and to know both Turtle and JSON-LD.    Seems 
kind of a burden to me.   Maybe worthwhile, but there's a real cost.

       -- Sandro

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2014 16:23:28 UTC