Re: Pragmatic Problems in the RDF Ecosystem (Was: Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal)

Hello, Ghislain,

Replies inline:

On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 10:31 AM Ghislain Atemezing <
auguste.atemezing@eurecom.fr> wrote:

> Hi Steven,
> Very interesting points. Please let me try below inline to understand
> better some of your “frustrations"
>
> Le 27 nov. 2018 à 14:27, Steven Harms <sgharms@stevengharms.com> a écrit :
>
> What would have been different if you started by searching for
> “tools/library to create knowledge graph” ? Even better, “how to create
> structured data in RDF”?
> You will have seen things like schema.org, google structured data
> tooling, JSON-LD and probably Wikidata
>

I agree that those are more articulate search queries although they have a
grasp of the subtlety of the domain such that the person who asks them in
this way probably knows how to get the solution to their problem (per David
Booth, "*you* are not the average programmer"). To try to stretch the
bounds of my process I tried these suggestions out and my results were a
bit different.

I just tried out the first one and was taken to a site which offered me a
pop-up ad to sign up for an HTML course and told me about a suite of tools
I could use for the low price of $30.00 / month. Close tab.

I then tried the second and was taken to the W3C document for creating RDF
from tabular data. That document opens up with this bit of excitement:

> This document describes the processing of tabular data to create an RDF
subject-predicate-object triples [rdf11-concepts]. Since RDF is an abstract
syntax, these triples may be serialized in a concrete RDF syntax such as
N-Triples [n-triples], Turtle [turtle], RDFa [rdfa-primer], JSON-LD
[json-ld], or TriG [trig]. The RDF serializations offered by a conversion
application is implementation defined.

Close tab.

While the resources might very well exist their presentation is neither as
unified nor as clear as React's. For those who might argue that Facebook
has a lot more money than a standards-based group, I'll point out that the
EmberJS team has maintained glorious documentation ever since the library
shipped. It's not a question of dollars or euros, it's a question of
kindness and focus.


> To the pragmatic 33%-er, React's site says: "You're welcome here, prepare
> to be
> awesome.”
>
>
> If you searched for "rdf tools”, you’ll find this link to W3C
> https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Tools (maybe not up to date), but could
> be a starter.
>

I have visited this page before and many of the links were rotten or lead
to software that's incompatible with current versions of OSX (mentioned in
the original post). Furthermore, the first link that does something is to
Jena which is absolutely NOT a conceptual explanation for how RDF writing
is abstracted by these tools. It's an introduction to an API for a Java
library. Not what I'm after.

W3C also provides some BP documents for some aspects of using RDF and
> related specs. Just search for "best practices rdf” on Google.
>

This is another W3C dense, unapproachable bit of reference, but I'll grant
it has some useful patterns. Thank you. I don't believe it undermines the
substance of my issue, but it is a useful reference.

Steven


-- 
Steven G. Harms
PGP: E6052DAF
<https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x337AF45BE6052DAF>