Re: EasierRDF

Hi Hugh, Melvin,

Which (I say) is nowhere near as successful as the SW was intended or hoped to be.
What can you offer the WebDevs, rather than you? (It is the Semantic *Web*, after all).
In fact, what can you offer Frederick?
[..] He is trying to do something hard, and so it is hard.
Is that right?
Because he seems to be saying it is easier in other technologies.
(Putting this as a top-level comment because I hid it in a prior answer) In light of Melvin’s comments: with regards to WebDev, there have been very recent efforts to make RDF more usable in JS (aptly called RDF-JS<https://rdf.js.org/data-model-spec/>) – checkout the N3.js<https://github.com/rdfjs/N3.js/> and graphy.js<https://github.com/blake-regalia/graphy.js> libraries. Not saying it’s as easy to use JSON in JS (JavaScript Object Notation may have a bit of an unfair advantage in, well, JavaScript).
One can rather easily construct JS objects that encode a simple RDF graph (.. discounting cycles and such), as illustrated in the graphy.js docs<https://graphy.link/concise#hash_c3>.
This could go some way in meeting Melvin’s suggestion of using plain old JSON as a basis, moving to vocabulary terms as object keys (and values, where needed), and to (other parts of) JSON-LD (not *such* a big leap actually) if folks are interested. I’m still unsure about the “first” step in this sequence, however, since I don’t know where the terms “name”, “born”, etc. are coming from; it’d become quite a mess if everyone is just using their own custom terminology.

William
> On 15 Feb 2022, at 00:22, <hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl> <hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl> wrote:
>
> Melvin,
>
> I want to respond to your comments in two emails.
>
> [MC] Yes, it's easier for web devs because:
>
> - it's JSON
> [HT] There is more in the world than web devs; if so required we could use JSON-LD, not JSON
>
> - you dont need a parser -- this is a big deal
> [HT] rfc4627 – par. 4.  Parsers
>    A JSON parser transforms a JSON text into another representation.
>    A JSON parser MUST accept all texts that conform to the JSON grammar.
>    A JSON parser MAY accept non-JSON forms or extensions.
>
> - xsd -- few developers will even know what that is
> [HT] Because they use JSON, and thus don’t know about XML Schema. How does JSON distinguish between an arithmetic number and a ZIP code?
>
> - turtle is a new syntax for most devs, they wont know what ex: is -- in fact, it isn’t even defined in your example
> [HT] @prefix ex: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/> .   where ex: is often used in RDF or OWL examples for the prefix denoting ‘example’
>
> - people dont know what ^^ means
> [HT] One is never too old to learn. I guess it means ‘member of’
>
> - a tiny portion of the web is turtle, a large portion is turtle, there's no practical way to handle that
> [HT] Poor RDF-devs :(( , who have no tools at all....
>
> What I mean is that nobody (slightly tongue-in-cheek) cares about what's IN the ontology, descriptions, labels, OWL.  People use schema.org for the name spacing and the SEO.  People care about name spacing, they dont care about inferencing.  It's hard to even find wide spread examples of inferencing used in the wild
> [HT] Not in your world.
>
> Very important thing here about "ex:"
> You've actually just made this data into a silo
> [HT] In business data are in silo’s.
>
> With my example "name" in one JSON document is "name" in another JSON document
> [HT] ‘name’ is 이름  in Korean. Actually they have 7 different words for ‘name’. Your mindset is too local (which is OK with me, don’t get me wrong)
>
> That is to say, JSON sent from one machine to another remains stable
> [HT] Yeh. How many terms are standardized in JSON? In UK or US English?
>
> In your example, every different document will have a different namespace, depending on what 'ex:' is defined as, and whether it's absolute or relative.  In this case I assume it's relative
> This actually guarantees that the data does NOT interoperate.  Whereas if we'd standarized (or can still standardize) the semantic web on JSON with URLs and optionally vocabs, all different aspects interoperate as and when you need them to
> [HT] Do you have any idea how many sets of jargon terms there are? Our reference data library has some 40,000. In your example you used namespaces as well. Actually in the real world you can’t do without. http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Lennon is the ident given to John Lennon in a declaration in dbpedia (which, btw, I don’t care about) and I assume that he has been typed as a Person. But we have, for one medium size process plant, well over 10,000 such declarations with a wild variety of equipment, instruments, pipes, and streams. And no plant owner wants his data to be in the same cloud as the data of his competitors.
> Interoperation is done by federating triple stores under selective access rules.
>
> So, Melvin, you and your web devs aren’t the only ones using the semantic web. I respect your requirements, please do so with our requirements. Your stuff seems to be better for you, our stuff is better for us.
>
> Regards, Hans
> ___________________________________________________
> From: hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl <hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl>
> Sent: maandag 14 februari 2022 18:07
> To: 'Melvin Carvalho' <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>; 'Frederik Byl' <frederik.byl@gmail.com>
> Cc: 'Semantic Web' <semantic-web@w3.org>; 'David Booth' <david@dbooth.org>
> Subject: RE: EasierRDF
>
> Melvin,
>
> Is your:
>
> <script type="application/ld+json">
>   {
>     "@id": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Lennon",
>     "name": "John Lennon",
>     "born": "1940-10-09",
>     "spouse": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cynthia_Lennon"
>   }
> </script>
>
> easier than:
>
> ex:John_Lennon
>             ex:name "John Lennon" ;
>             ex:born "1940-10-09"^^xsd:date ;
>             ex:spouse ex:Cynthia_Lennon .
> ?
>
> And please speak for yourself when claiming:  “..... creating and maintaining ontologies (which let's face it, almost no one does or cares about today)”.
> I do care and I know there are more who do. I do care because I am caring for interoperability and for life-cycle information integration. That requires precise typing and a global reference library.
> It is the modeling sloppiness that is invited and permitted by these languages that is the problem. Imho it is not much more precise than writing something on a piece of paper.
>
> Finally this: “....libraries are yet to be built out” –some kind of ontologies anyway?
>
> Regards, Hans
> 15926.org
> __________________________________________
> From: Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> Sent: maandag 14 februari 2022 15:49
> To: Frederik Byl <frederik.byl@gmail.com>
> Cc: Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>; David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
> Subject: Re: EasierRDF
>
>
>
> On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 at 13:24, Frederik Byl <frederik.byl@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear community,
>>
>> I came across the project https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF. I think it is a good idea to have a look at RDF and the challenges it has. I'm struggling with the use, because the work that is necessary to make systems interoperable by understanding ontologies, formatting the data, extending ontologies, writing queries, etc, is huge! I am a big fan of graph databases and the ease of using Neo4j, Cypher, plain json and writing converters between readable json formats is so much faster and developer friendly. Queries in Cypher are intuitively and can be understood on sight. I am also looking at Solid and I find the approach of data pods extremely interesting and relevant, but the structure is so overwhelming and overcomplicated that I start losing faith in this. Since the project EasierRDF is started, I guess others struggle with the same? Are there some major advantages of using RDF and Sparql over Neo4j and Cypher? We could do linked data with Json-ld and Neo4j?
>
> I came to realize than in 15 years of heavy RDF use, the useful 10% is what I use 90% of the time
>
> You might want to look at this one-pager which tries to take some of the useful bits of RDF (@id @type @context) and add it to JSON
>
> https://linkedobjects.org/

>
> It is for beginners getting started, and has an upgrade path to JSON-LD and full RDF, for those that want it.  It's also compatible with plain old JSON, without needing the overhead of creating and maintaining ontologies (which let's face it, almost no one does or cares about today)
>
> Use cases and libraries are yet to be built out, but hopefully some food for thought
>
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Frederik
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
>> Van: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
>> Date: do 10 feb. 2022 om 16:56
>> Subject: Re: EasierRDF
>> To: Frederik Byl <frederik.byl@gmail.com>
>>
>>
>> Hi Frederik,
>>
>> You are asking an excellent question, and I think the community as a
>> whole would benefit from discussing it on a public list, both to get
>> more viewpoints and to expose your question to other existing RDF users.
>>   Would you be willing to post your question to the public
>> semantic-web@w3.org list?
>> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/

>>
>> Thanks,
>> David Booth
>>
>> On 2/10/22 10:43, Frederik Byl wrote:
>> > Dear David,
>> >
>> > I am sorry to contact you in this straightforward manner. I came across
>> > your project https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF

>> > <https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF>. I think it is a good idea to have a
>> > look at RDF and the challenges it has. I'm struggling with the use and
>> > the work that is necessary to make systems interoperable by
>> > understanding ontologies, formatting the data, extending ontologies etc,
>> > is huge! I am a big fan of graph databases and the ease of using Neo4j
>> > and plain json and writing converters between readable json formats is
>> > so much faster and developer friendly. I am also looking at Solid and I
>> > find the approach of data pods extremely interesting and relevant, but
>> > the structure is so overwhelming and overcomplicated that I start losing
>> > faith in this.Since you started the project Easier RDF, I guess you
>> > struggle with the same, or do you see some major advantages in using RDF?
>> >
>> > Thanks
>> >
>> > Kind regards,
>> > Frederik