Syntactical interoperability: a strategic consideration?

Dear all,

The Semantic Web community aims to build systems with semantic interoperability.

As many of us have probably experienced at some point, convincing others that RDF is a great fit for a particular use case, can sometimes be tricky.
However, we always have the promise of long-term interoperability as a key argument.

Recently, I became aware that the upcoming RDF 1.2 standards might update the existing definition of text/turtle and others.
For those interested, the technical discussion is happening at https://github.com/w3c/rdf-star-wg/issues/141

However, there is potentially a larger strategic consideration that concerns all of us.
If we arrive at a situation where two systems that both indicate to accept text/turtle, cannot talk to each other, we have a massive reputation problem.
How can we claim semantic interoperability, if we do not have explicit syntactical interoperability?

I fear this adds brittleness to RDF-based systems, to the extent that it might cause people to conclude “RDF doesn’t work”.
And I’d be inclined to actually agreeing with them, rather than attempting a conversation about RDF 1.1 versus 1.2 details,
while selling them on RDF was the hard thing in the first place. It endangers the credibility of our entire technology stack, in my opinion.

I’m not looking to add pressure on the WG or the technical side of the argument.
Rather, I’m interested in your opinions on whether the strategic and reputational risk is as big as I perceive it,
and hopefully to find people who can defuse my arguments and worries.

Thanks in advance,

Ruben
--
Ruben Verborgh (they/them)
Professor of Decentralized Web Technology
IDLab, Ghent University – imec
https://ruben.verborgh.org/ – @RubenVerborgh

Received on Thursday, 16 January 2025 14:26:29 UTC