5 ms·

As someone completely out of the loop on this one but deeply entrenched in modern web development, I have some questions. 1. What benefit does this format give

As someone completely out of the loop on this one but deeply entrenched in modern web development, I have some questions. 1. What benefit does this format give that other schema systems do not? 2. The `@context` just seems like a way of defining variables. As best as I can tell, the use case leads to one only using each of these "variables" once. What's the benefit? 3. What benefit does RDF in any format provide to the average web developer? Sorry if these questions are asinine. It's just that the article bemoans the fact that this hasn't hit mainstream web development yet, to my mind, does nothing to encourage its use.

Boulth 8y ago
1. This is not a schema language. 2. Context is for shortcuts, all properties can be expanded to full names but these are qualified and long. 3. Benefit over what? RDF is for describing things with machine readable language.
- neurotrace 8y ago
  1. The article states that the `@context` is basically a schema and JSON-LD provides a consistent way of formatting JSON data. Sounds a lot like a schema for JSON. 2. Okay, so you either put the long data in the `@context` or in the original data. I suppose it may improve readability but for a data interchange format (which I believe this is), it seems wasteful. 3. Benefit in general. Why would I use RDF at all? What is any of this for? I can describe my data just fine with normal JSON. Why should I design my JSON in this way?
  - Boulth 8y ago
    I think it's useful to put this into perspective, if you're designing a format for your backend and frontend you don't need semantic data. If you're one party providing API to others you don't need it too. But if there is an ecosystem of independent parties providing and consuming data there is a need for a way of describing meaning of your fields. By meaning I don't mean "field X is ISO time" (that would be JSON schema) but rather "field X is date of birth". As for practical uses JSON-LD is used by Google to scrape things from the internet, and check if they got a Place here, Person or maybe a Business. Activitypub that powers Mastodon is also JSON-LD.
titanix2 8y ago
> 3. What benefit does RDF in any format provide to the average web developer? Probably (almost) none, otherwise in its 20 years of existence it would have been used somewhere. Heck, even Semantic Web scholars actually don't use it for their own personal websites...
- jshen 8y ago
  It provides a lot of benefits, see my other comment on this thread for a few specific benefits.
  - titanix2 8y ago
    I read your post and you rose valid points. I think one problem though is that RDF is a solution searching for a problem to solve. It's clear it was designed from some abstract space instead to be a solution evolving from real use cases. And that's why most people have a hard time understand it, and even more putting it in practice. For example, even basic RDF concepts such as a resource are hard to grasp. You have an IRI, great, but should it be dereferenceable? If yes, what it expected to be returned: a document in various formats or more RDF triples? If not (URN case), what to do with it? All these problematics are not addressed in the spec itself but must be understood before even starting to implement a hello world. There is interesting projects such as DBpedia. Another problem of RDF is social and pertains to its advocates: trying to impose the technology everywhere without taking in account the audience needs nor the limitations of the technology itself is not going to work great. See the suggestions made during this workshop to improve the technology: https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/ https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/ In 9 years (half of its live), nothing was addressed.
    - jshen 8y ago
      I think it solves a real problem. I work at a large company, with many data silos. I’ve had to hire armies of interns to match in merge data over the years because it wasn’t possible to automate the merging of data from different databases. I agree with your other points though, people have a hard time understanding it, and the community hasn’t really shown the value. My hobby project is an effort to show the value, but it’s not ready to share yet. And yes, there’s a lot of confusion things (URI vs URL, dereference or not) that the community hasn’t done a good job articulating a happy path. There’s another you didn’t mention, there’s an impedance mismatch between triples and resources. One is property oriented, and the other entity oriented, and they dont’ always play nice together.
rdtsc 8y ago
> Sorry if these questions are asinine. It's just that the article bemoans the fact that this hasn't hit mainstream web development yet, to my mind, does nothing to encourage its use. They are not, those are good questions. The fact that you've been able to make and deliver successful products for years without knowing or worrying about RDF or JSON-LD should make you suspicious of JSON-LD and it's value proposition. I've been hearing about for years and yet the development world is pretty happy moving ahead without it. I've looked at RDF and JSON-LD some years back when designing a web API shrugged and ignored it. Now sure, it's nice. It's like having a car with chrome plated rims instead of regular rims. It's better, shinier, prettier but not enough for me to bother to spend time (money) to get it.

Boulth 8y ago

1. This is not a schema language. 2. Context is for shortcuts, all properties can be expanded to full names but these are qualified and long. 3. Benefit over what? RDF is for describing things with machine readable language.

neurotrace 8y ago
1. The article states that the `@context` is basically a schema and JSON-LD provides a consistent way of formatting JSON data. Sounds a lot like a schema for JSON. 2. Okay, so you either put the long data in the `@context` or in the original data. I suppose it may improve readability but for a data interchange format (which I believe this is), it seems wasteful. 3. Benefit in general. Why would I use RDF at all? What is any of this for? I can describe my data just fine with normal JSON. Why should I design my JSON in this way?
- Boulth 8y ago
  I think it's useful to put this into perspective, if you're designing a format for your backend and frontend you don't need semantic data. If you're one party providing API to others you don't need it too. But if there is an ecosystem of independent parties providing and consuming data there is a need for a way of describing meaning of your fields. By meaning I don't mean "field X is ISO time" (that would be JSON schema) but rather "field X is date of birth". As for practical uses JSON-LD is used by Google to scrape things from the internet, and check if they got a Place here, Person or maybe a Business. Activitypub that powers Mastodon is also JSON-LD.

titanix2 8y ago

> 3. What benefit does RDF in any format provide to the average web developer? Probably (almost) none, otherwise in its 20 years of existence it would have been used somewhere. Heck, even Semantic Web scholars actually don't use it for their own personal websites...

jshen 8y ago
It provides a lot of benefits, see my other comment on this thread for a few specific benefits.
- titanix2 8y ago
  I read your post and you rose valid points. I think one problem though is that RDF is a solution searching for a problem to solve. It's clear it was designed from some abstract space instead to be a solution evolving from real use cases. And that's why most people have a hard time understand it, and even more putting it in practice. For example, even basic RDF concepts such as a resource are hard to grasp. You have an IRI, great, but should it be dereferenceable? If yes, what it expected to be returned: a document in various formats or more RDF triples? If not (URN case), what to do with it? All these problematics are not addressed in the spec itself but must be understood before even starting to implement a hello world. There is interesting projects such as DBpedia. Another problem of RDF is social and pertains to its advocates: trying to impose the technology everywhere without taking in account the audience needs nor the limitations of the technology itself is not going to work great. See the suggestions made during this workshop to improve the technology: https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/ https://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/ In 9 years (half of its live), nothing was addressed.
  - jshen 8y ago
    I think it solves a real problem. I work at a large company, with many data silos. I’ve had to hire armies of interns to match in merge data over the years because it wasn’t possible to automate the merging of data from different databases. I agree with your other points though, people have a hard time understanding it, and the community hasn’t really shown the value. My hobby project is an effort to show the value, but it’s not ready to share yet. And yes, there’s a lot of confusion things (URI vs URL, dereference or not) that the community hasn’t done a good job articulating a happy path. There’s another you didn’t mention, there’s an impedance mismatch between triples and resources. One is property oriented, and the other entity oriented, and they dont’ always play nice together.

rdtsc 8y ago

> Sorry if these questions are asinine. It's just that the article bemoans the fact that this hasn't hit mainstream web development yet, to my mind, does nothing to encourage its use. They are not, those are good questions. The fact that you've been able to make and deliver successful products for years without knowing or worrying about RDF or JSON-LD should make you suspicious of JSON-LD and it's value proposition. I've been hearing about for years and yet the development world is pretty happy moving ahead without it. I've looked at RDF and JSON-LD some years back when designing a web API shrugged and ignored it. Now sure, it's nice. It's like having a car with chrome plated rims instead of regular rims. It's better, shinier, prettier but not enough for me to bother to spend time (money) to get it.