Re: Some heresies (was Re: Comments on "SPARQL 1.1 Uniform HTTP Protocol for Managing RDF Graphs")

On Wednesday 23. March 2011 10:34:54 tim.glover@bt.com wrote:
> THANK YOU!!!!!   Thank goodness someone is saying this at last.  I have
> watched in astonished amazement as University professors bickered for over
> a decade on how to say “The cat sat on the mat”. This is a ludicrous waste
> of effort.  RDF is garbage and should be consigned to the dustbin of
> history.

I cannot agree with this sentiment. To me, RDF is the simplest thing that 
could possibly work. The fact that it hasn't taken off is largely due to a lack 
of willingness in the community to create development tools that developers 
with a great degree of Web development experience can feel at home in. In this 
case, this problem goes all the way down to the specification (i.e. the RDF 
Dataset HTTP Protocol), which I think is very bad.

In part, it is also due to a lack of thought into what distinguishes the 
Semantic Web stack from other alternatives, and an occasional failure to 
exploit that to gain further momentum. For example, I'm convinced that without 
LimitByResource, which is a simple syntactic sugar thing, SPARQL cannot gain 
mainstream adoption.

Many things could be achieved with RDF. We have the data, we have a lot of 
momentum, we have the plumbing. It could be immensly useful. We just need to 
make the extra effort to make it so.

Best,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Ph.d. Student, Semantic Web
kjekje@ifi.uio.no
http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 19:46:37 UTC