Re: Designing a Linked Data developer experience

I agree that this is the key thing that needs building. 
Developers actually have no trouble building very complicated things if the tools are there,
and if there are examples for how to build it, and in the end money visible somehow at
the end of the line. Just look at any UI frameworks, the complexity of most types of
business apps, or even Web 2.0 apps.

Furthermore the App is the key to making the semantic web work, just as the
browser was to making the web work.

Some things that need to be looked at for libs:
  - tying in to good UI frameworks as Ruben pointed out
  - reasoning engines that work as continuations or streams, so that UI elements
  can be quickly rendered.
  - one needs RDF in the UI btw: because one needs to know which graphs information came from
  - because different people can say different things even contradictory, a notion of modality needs
   to be incorporated into all new UI designs - we need designers that can rethink the UI in modal 
logical terms, or in other words with points of views as key components.
  - And of course to avoid all the hassle writing to servers and updating HTTP one needs a read-write-web
   eg LPD and future improvements including access control, so libs need to be able to make it easy to 
update data


Then of course tools to help devs discover and reason about ontologies will end up being
used, just because there will be developers seeing the need for them.

Henry  



> On 28 Dec 2018, at 17:20, Ruben Verborgh (UGent-imec) <Ruben.Verborgh@UGent.be> wrote:
> 
> 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 18:15:25 UTC