Re: Minutes for F2F 10/08

In the draft TAG minutes of 8-Oct-2012, I noticed this in the discussion
of "Documenting meaning of individual IRIs (ISSUE-57)":
> I checked in http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2012/10/08-minutes.html

[[
Tim: David Booth said that all we need to worry about is RDF ... in that
RDF is creating the problem
  <jar> that's not correct
  <jar> the json case is interesting.
HT: If you write XML or JSON you always say what the URIs mean
  <jar> if we can give advice on that one, then the rdf case will
follow ... rdf is harder though, so start with json
]]

I don't understand how the RDF case can be harder than JSON, when RDF
can be serialized as JSON.  AFAICT, serialization is mostly irrelevant
to the central issues of httpRange-14 and issue-57.  

The point is that the Semantic Web is about enabling machine processing.
It doesn't really matter what data serialization is used, provided that
the information can be interpreted by machine.  If it can be interpreted
by machine, then it is logically equivalent to RDF.  Since RDF is syntax
independent, *any* structured data format can be viewed as a
serialization of RDF, including RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, JSON, XML, CSV,
etc.  

This means that for simplicity, and without loss of generality, one may
as well assume that the data is simply RDF, and start the discussion
there instead of worrying about one syntax or another.  This is
completely analogous to discussions in programming language design, in
which an abstract syntax is used in discussions of features and
semantics instead of being bothered with the details and complications
of concrete syntax that are not important at that point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax
Obviously syntax must be addressed eventually, but not at the semantic
level.


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Thursday, 1 November 2012 16:29:54 UTC