Re: Pragmatic Authoring Tools for RDF Stores

Dear Mr. Harms,

This is my first mail on this list so please forgive any rules of
etiquette that I might break.

> 
> After reading up on RDF, vocabulary authoring, and getting to know a number
> of vocabularies, I want to populate a collection. However, when I make my
> first steps in this regard I find myself both hindered and confused by lack
> of tooling.
>

I have found much the same myself in the time that I have worked in
the Semantic Web/Linked Data space.  I joined this mailing list in the
last couple of days in the hopes that I might be able to find other
people who are working in this area and might be able to advise me.

> *Interface: *As an example, I'd expect to be able to find a tool that lets
> one import vocabularies to the tool as the available options with authoring
> statements. Given the "triple," I'd expect to select a subject, predicate,
> object as chosen from those data provided by the cached vocabularies.
> 
> When I look for such a thing (https://www.w3.org/wiki/AuthoringToolsForRDF),
> the tools are mostly > 10 years old with few updates and no *de facto*
> standard.
> In general, most searches to find an authoring platform point to dead links
> or bit-rotted pages. Ultimately, this leads me to ask whether my
> understanding is correct.
>
> Questions:
> 
> 1. Is authoring like I described above desirable, expected? Is it hoped
> that individuals would think "Hm, instead of a bulleted list in a Google
> Doc, I'll add these notes using (sought RDF tool)." Or is the expectation
> that some other storage / interface / solution that emits RDF will be the
> primary interface?
>

There is Protégé (https://protege.stanford.edu/).  However, this is
primarily devoted to writing ontologies (vocabularies) than straight
RDF.

> 2. Assuming individual authorship *is* a desired thing, is the "Interface"
> I described above a reasonable sketch of the user experience?
> 
> 3. Assuming individual authorship as desirable and the UX as appropriate,
> why doesn't that (seem to?) exist?
>

I cannot answer the "why" question myself but my experience has been
that using Emacs + ttl-mode with an added dash of autocomplete works
alright.  I have a collaborator who uses Atom + language-rdf plugin.
These solutions are not brilliant but they are functional when hand
authoring RDF.  We need to do it this way because we are human
curators working on putting the early Irish genealogies
(https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen) into a graph database format (in
this case RDF).  I can only guess that because the Semantic Web did
not catch on in the wider community that these tools were not
commercially viable
(https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html, as seen on
Hacker News recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408)).

It would be great to have an authoring tool that could be used.  I ran
a workshop on RDF for people working in the Humanities (where I did my
post graduate work) and it was difficult to teach them RDF without a
tool that would ease them into it by giving them indications when they
made mistakes and giving them hints based on the prefixes used and
other contextual information that an editor would have.

I hope this helps.

All the best,
Chris