Re: Blank Nodes Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal

On 11/26/2018 9:49 PM, David Booth wrote:
> It is hard for very smart people to see why concepts that are simple to 
> them are *not* so simple for others who have significantly less 
> intellectual horsepower.  Typically it is not any one concept that makes 
>   a subject too hard, but the totality of the interaction between 
> multiple concepts, each with its own exceptions and caveats, that pushes 
> the user over his/her mental threshold of "too hard".

It's not necessarily the case of not enough horsepower.  Being able to 
read and digest the content of formal specifications, and being able to 
put that to use, isn't easy.  It's very abstract, even more abstract 
than a lot of everyday programming.  A lot of folks just don't do that 
well.  It's been remarked before in this thread (I think by you?) that 
there isn't a lot of good tutorial material out there on how to 
understand and use RDF-related tools and data design.

If you mean to make it easier for the middle ranks of programmers to 
work with linked data, then those people are going to have to understand 
quite a lot about semantics - since it's probably rare for two data sets 
to have exactly the same semantics for things that are apparently the 
same - and about data cleaning, truth maintenance, and imputation of 
missing data.  Absent those things, for someone to blithely forge ahead 
linking data right and left is only going to cause trouble.

So arguably it will be important to make *those* things easier for 
middle rank workers to understand and deal with.  RDF details, not so 
much.  We could probably put together a profile that disallows certain 
RDF usages and encourages certain idioms, and be done with that part of 
it.  Then the hard work would start.

TomP

Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2018 04:55:43 UTC