Re: Designing a Linked Data developer experience

On 28/12/2018 16:20, Ruben Verborgh (UGent-imec) 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.

Ruben,

Brilliant work: thank you.

On a less cutting-edge, but maybe more generic, level, I wonder why there is (AFAIK) no W3C 'GOM' (Graph Object Model) for RDF. The existence of the Recommendations for DOM and XPath has led to the implementation of support for these abstract models in most web UI development frameworks.  If completion of work on DOM had been followed by development of a GOM in say 2005, I suspect that the subsequent story would have been quite different.

A quick search turns up the Property Graph and API community group [1], which was founded in 2013 but then seems to have lost interest in itself.  Its blurb mentions "we need to bear in mind that there are several Property Graph vendors and implementations and we may not want to deviate significantly from current practice".  Is that the problem?

Thanks,

Richard

[1] https://www.w3.org/community/propertygraphs/




Best,

Ruben

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


--
Richard Light