Re: GRDDLing JSON?

You can do quite a lot of mapping vanilla json into json-ld using json-ld
contexts. Unlike xml there are only so many ways to say stuff and the
content tends towards being objects and properties anyhow.

If you’re going to have a turing complete mapping framework you probably
should just use JS.

Cheers

Dan

On Fri, 9 Feb 2024 at 17:58, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm rather out of the loop, so apologies if something like this has
> already been discussed, implemented even. But I feel obliged to flag an
> issue, offer a potential solution (which might already exist).
>
> # Use case :
> For the past few days I've been working on a bit of code where a
> processing pipeline will be set up declaratively. I'm still on baby steps,
> but it's a place where RDF should be ideal. A little graph defines the
> nodes & arcs of the processing system.
>
> To get the code started, I only need a trivial model to work from. A
> simple list, (input reader)->(process)-> (output writer).
> So at this stage, it seemed reasonable just to use a minimal JSON list.
> Generalise to RDF later.
> There's a sequence of nodes, each with an instance ID and a type for the
> nature of the thing.
> A very simple JSON structure covers it.
>
> # Issue :
> But looking ahead, I wondered how to migrate from the arbitrary JSON to an
> RDF model. Obviously, JSON-LD.
> In my head I saw a namespace declaration, the rest just lifted & placed
> there from the keys in the JSON mappings. But in practice, it's not quite
> like that, it gets ugly fast.
> I guess it's basically a syntax issue.
> What you see in the (arbitrary) JSON expression is visually/intuitively
> understandable. Ditto in Turtle. But in JSON-LD, any kind, the immediacy of
> interpretation by a human (this one at least)  is lost.
>
> # Proposed Solution :
> I don't know if anyone remembers GRDDL [1]. An elegant approach for
> bridging between anyXML and RDF.  One added attribute in the doc, to say it
> has an RDF representation and here's how to get it. It's an easy inclusion
> in namespaced XML, we* went for XSLT transformers, a very immediate
> approach. Imagine an org with loads of XML documents of the same shape. A
> transformation has to be written once, that pointer inserted in all these
> docs, very low-effort mapping to the RDF world.
> As far as I'm aware, to date, absolutely no-one has ever used this.
>
> *But* the idea is great. Forget XML, let's do JSON.
> Add one (presumably top-level) name value pair in a JSON doc:
>
> { "http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#", "http://example.org/this-to-that"
> ...
> }
>
> At http://example.org/this-to-that you have the definition of how to take
> this arbitrary JSON and make it a citizen of the Web.
>
> I'll say again, you might well just want to bin this if such things have
> been dealt with already.
> But it did strike me that in practice, I was facing horrible stuff to look
> at. Please remember RDF/XML's role in adoption.
>
> Cheers,
> Danny.
>
> [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/
>
> * yeah, I was on the GRDDL Working Group. Memory totally gone over my
> contributions, but in these things I generally only offer /wrong/ arguments
> (realise years later), which post-factum I convince myself are useful to
> get the people with their heads screwed on to look at things more closely.
> I'm still a little irritated I didn't get a credit in the doc, I poked Dan
> Connolly and he said he's sort it, Didn't. It did mean something to me, one
> of the very few things I've been involved with which had a very pleasing
> end product (even if absolutely no-one uses it).
>
> I should also confess I was mouthy in the JSON-LD group at the start, but
> quietly shuffled away when I realised the other folks had magnitudes better
> grasp.
>
> --
> ----
>
> https://hyperdata.it <http://hyperdata.it/danja>
>
>