Re: Turtle and JSON-LD Matter

On 16 July 2014 18:23, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Just FYI:

The any23.org folks just said they are going to add a JSON LD <-> turtle
transformer.

Since apache can intercept content types and do a rewrite based on it,
perhaps it could be a one liner in .htaccess for moving from supporting
turtle to JSON LD and vice versa.


>
>       -- Sandro
>
>
>
>