Re: An RDF wishlist


On 1 Jul 2010, at 14:05, Ed Summers wrote:

> Wonderful post Dan. I think the work you and others have been doing w/
> Facebook on the OpenGraphProtocol is a great example of how we ought
> to be thinking about the future of RDF ... building vocabularies to
> describe web resources, describing relationships between these
> resources...basically embracing the web that we have...just like Edd
> did with XTech.
>
> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>> The very nature of RDF makes it somewhat annoying to work with. RDF
>> data is always going to be a kind of frankenstein's data monster,
>> patched together from bits and pieces that can just about be made to
>> fit together. Fortunately, we have at our fingertips a world wide Web
>> that lets us share an awful lot of these bits; the more we can get
>> re-usable RDF datasets out there, the less people will worry about the
>> pain of using it, and the more likely it'll be that there will be
>> genuinely useful, relevant data on hand when someone goes looking for
>> it.
>
> I find the hardest thing to get newbies (like myself not too long ago)
> to understand is that when one consumes RDF (in whatever
> serialization) you need to operate on it like a graph instead of as a
> hierarchical document (xml, json).  I guess this is where SPARQL comes
> in, but if you have to get a SPARQL stack set up to just work with
> some data you fetched from a URI ...

Absolutely! In my experience training people on this stuff this is exactly the sticking point, everyone is used to navigating trees, not graphs and without understanding the graph data model rdf serialisations are opaque.

rob


>
> I was pleased to see a JSON Serialization for RDF make it into the top
> 5 improvements [1]. I think a canonical, idiomatic JSON representation
> for RDF would simplify processing of RDF data on the web. Like RDFa,
> it would encourage the use of the RDF data model for describing little
> bits of the Giant Global Graph we call the World Wide Web.
>
> //Ed
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2010/06/rdf-work-items/table

>


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Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 15:49:38 UTC