Re: Blank nodes must DIE! [ was Re: Blank nodes semantics - existential variables?]

> [clipped]
> 
> 
> (terminological aside) When folk here talk of getting rid of bnodes, is 
> this an (unfortunate) shorthand for getting rid of non-URI bnode labels 
> from rdf-related syntaxes?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> We have - scattered across the Web - mountains of Schema.org written 
> mostly in json-ld and Microdata, published on tens of millions of sites, 
> describing in varying levels of detail, umpteen-bazzilion real world 
> things. Most of that has bnodes for non-literal nodes in the graph. 
> Those nodes have types like Event, Person, Place, Product, NewsArticle, 
> ClaimReview etc. Having been part of the effort to get RDF into the 
> lives of ordinary people since 1997 I consider this a win.
> 
> In our experience with this effort at Google, the usability issues come 
> into play more when you try to hook up these mini-graphs across 
> documents, sites or parts of pages. This is the case regardless of 
> whether the graph-connectivity is achieved via URIs or via other tricks. 
> It is just more complicated for most people, compared to the standalone 
> case with no external dependencies to consider.
> 
> Telling publishers they have to manage and assign URIs to every node in 
> the graph would - if successful - certainly make life easier for data 
> consumers. But it would be a massive up front usability hit to the 
> entire effort. I believe it would simply fail in the primary Schema.org 
> scenarios in mainstream web markup.
> 
> I am afraid btw that talking in terms of "middle 33%" of developers sets 
> us a monolithic and rather elitist perspective on how skills and 
> abilities with modern networked computing can be compared. Someone might 
> be amazing at CSS, site speed optimization, analytics, accessibility and 
> in understanding the needs of a site's various user constituencies, 
> without happening to conceptualize Schema markup in graph database or 
> open data aggregation terms. What % of the way up the developer rankings 
> are they? who cares! What's a "developer" anyway?
> 
> 
> While I would be very happy for more parties to publish and consume 
> Schema.org "as graph data", and to appreciate the power that comes with 
> data linking, layering merging via well known identifiers,... you just 
> can't force this on people by changing some w3c standards. Wikidata 
> provides a more inspiring example, where people are seduced into taking 
> the [knowledge] graph perspective because it is powerful and useful. Not 
> because w3c banned something from a spec.
> 
> Banishing URI-less IDs from graph formats is a recipe for more junk IDs 
> polluting the data and jumbling up the graph connectivity. It is 
> important to leave our data formats open enough for publishers to be 
> able to mention some real world entity in passing without jumping 
> through bureaucratic hoops.
> 
> We live in an age when I can sit in a cafe and program via Python a 
> pretrained neural network (using my phone!) to classify the species of 
> bird depicted in a photo I have just taken (it was some kind of coot, I 
> think). Just a few years ago, this was rocket science -
> https://xkcd.com/1425/ is between 5 and 10 years out of date. In such a 
> historical moment do we truly wish to be the group who tell the world 
> that they are not allowed to write data that say things like "... in the 
> country whose name is France" instead of "in the country 
> https://dbpedia.org/resource/France"? Even those who don't laugh at us 
> will ignore our demands (and file formats). More carrots and less 
> sticks, please. "Killing bnodes" is shifting work from data consumers to 
> data publishers, in an environment when we want publishers to publish 
> more data not less.

+1

I didn't follow the whole discussion, because I don't see the need to 
have a discussion with the topic "Blank nodes must DIE" and I guess I'm 
not the only one, but many others are tired of having the discussion. 
I'm using RDF with blank nodes for years and didn't have big problems. 
When I had a closer look at the problems people had with blank nodes, I 
always noticed it's actually a problem with their tooling. So get your 
tooling fixed, get maybe some higher-level specs fixed, but the RDF 
model doesn't need a fix at that regard.

bergi

Received on Friday, 3 July 2020 21:50:00 UTC