Designing a Linked Data developer experience

Dear all,

The thread on easier RDF on this mailing list was/is probably the discussion of the year.

Another perspective on this topic is “how can we make Linked Data easy for non-RDF people?”
Or perhaps: “do developers need to know RDF to build Linked Data applications?”

While Semantic Web technologies have been successful in several specialized areas,
we still don’t have end-user applications that directly use Linked Data from the Web.
We’ve often referred to it as our chicken-and-egg problem,
and even though there’s a lot of data online, we’re not seeing a lot of consumer apps.

In my latest blog post [1], I am arguing that we haven’t sufficiently focused
on front-end developers, who are the ones building apps for end users.
Such front-end developers are very hesitant to start working with RDF or even “easy RDF”.
Rather, they want integration with existing languages, frameworks, and tools they are using.
And whether we like it or not, those include JavaScript, React, GraphQL, and the likes.

This led me to the question of whether we can design a developer experience for Linked Data
without needing to expose RDF and its complexities, with a couple of concrete suggestions
and lessons learned.

Your feedback is most welcome.

Best,

Ruben

[1] https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2018/12/28/designing-a-linked-data-developer-experience/

Received on Friday, 28 December 2018 16:21:11 UTC