Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal

Hi Ruben,

This is quite intriguing.  To follow up and get more concrete, I very 
much hope that you will post any suggestions you have about how we could 
make the RDF ecosystem easier, based on your work.

Thanks,
David Booth

On 11/22/18 3:53 AM, Ruben Verborgh (UGent-imec) wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
>> At the
>> same time, a painful reality has emerged: RDF is too hard for
>> *average* developers.  By "average developers" I mean those
>> in the middle 33 percent of ability.
> 
> A couple of months ago, I had an eye-opening experience.
> I was at a GraphQL conference,
> where the audience consisted of front-end developers.
> 
> Now front-end developers are a new generation.
> They did not exist back when RDF was conceived.
> 
> They are the people who make the cool things that we see.
> They’re developers who want build fun stuff
> and have fun while doing so.
> Several of them are actually proud of the fact
> that they are not “decent programmers”,
> but that they nonetheless make things work nicely.
> 
> If we want to see more Linked Data apps,
> they are our target audience.
> 
> We need to make working with Linked Data fun.
> We need to focus on the developer experience.
> 
> Over the past couple of months, I spent quite some time
> in the context of the Solid ecosystem
> thinking about how to make Linked Data programming fun.
> 
> A key decision there is that I aim to
> enable them to program with Linked Data
> without having to program with RDF.
> So in the context of this thread,
> “easier RDF” to me means “Linked Data”.
> 
> 
> The main question is to see what tooling *they* are using
> and how to tap into their ecosystems.
> And guess what, they are not using Java
> like the majority of our stacks :-)
> They’re using JavaScript, TypeScript, React, etc.
> 
> That’s an important reason why the RDF/JS community
> in the past couple of years has been working
> to bring things to the browser.
> Check out our work at https://github.com/rdfjs
> 
> 
> Some of my recent work involves bringing Linked Data to React.
> See it here: https://github.com/solid/react-components
> And especially look at the source code of an example application:
> https://github.com/solid/profile-viewer-react/blob/master/src/App.js
> There’s Linked Data, WebID, FOAF, etc. happening there,
> but developers are not exposed to RDF.
> Compare this to the RDF-oriented alternate version:
> https://github.com/solid/profile-viewer-tutorial/blob/master/index.html
> https://github.com/solid/profile-viewer-tutorial/blob/master/scripts/main.js
> Both codebases are the same app, but totally different developer experiences.
> 
> 
> Crucial for such a good developer experience
> are also the right query languages.
> As much as I use SPARQL myself, it’s just too complex.
> 
> Here’s a JavaScript-based language for path queries,
> which reduce things such as “the user’s list of friends”
> to three words (user.friends.label) instead of a SPARQL query:
> – https://github.com/solid/query-ldflex
> – https://solid.github.io/ldflex-playground/
> 
> Here’s our some work for GraphQL over Linked Data
> by just providing a JSON-LD context to GraphQL queries:
> – http://query.linkeddatafragments.org/
> – https://comunica.github.io/Article-ISWC2018-Demo-GraphQlLD/
> 
> These are all things front-end developers recognize,
> and they get enthusiastic when they see this.
> They think Linked Data is fun. (RDF not so much.)
> 
> 
> By enabling front-end developers to build Linked Data applications,
> we massively extend our reach.
> I’ve had many conversations with front-end devs the past couple of months,
> and understanding their mindset is key to getting traction.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Ruben
> 
> PS A blog post on the Linked Data developer experience
> with the elements from this mail is in progress.
>

Received on Friday, 30 November 2018 22:28:20 UTC