Publishing JSON-LD for Developers

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.

I'm working on language ressources and graphs and in my opinion, RDF is so flawed you shouldn't even bother with it. I will address the topic during a conference in June (email me -- info in my profile -- for follow up or to get my articles if you're interested by the topic). JSON-LD is trying to make RDF sexier (more exactly said, RDF try to pimp itself by using JSON-LD) but as it is just RDF with a new serialization syntax, it share every of its issues.

Main issues are:

- a literal node (strings which carry the useful information for an human) cannot be the source of an edge, so you end up creating "resources" nodes and pushing content as leaf of the graph. Access to its is thus done with a lot of indirections.

- no annotations, which mean you cannot represent simple graph construct such as a weighted edge.

- blank nodes, needed to join more than two piece of data which, are anonymous so they are difficult to reuse. That's sad because a graph is supposed to make data link each other. Coupled with issue 1, it mean most linguistic resources graphs are actually closer to trees than real graphs.

- reliance on the web infrastructure (IRI, DNS, web servers, ...) which is a big dependency with a lot of gotchas and not fitted for every uses cases (self contained data for example)

- performances is abyssal. I tried one of the dictionary build on RDF, and some query took up to 40 seconds (!) to return no result. Even bloated web dictionaries perform under 2 seconds.

Also, the second sentence of the article is totally false. I read the history of JSON-LD by one of its main author [1], and it does not originated in the RDF community. It originated elsewhere, and then there was RDF people included in the loop.

[1] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/

Is there a reasonable alternative? I've worked with RDF and LD and can agree with most of your points but would like to see if there is something better on the horizon.

> 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...

Currently no. I am concerned with making dictionaries better (especially mobile applications), so I don't have a general purpose solution but I propose something for that use case. I basically started from scratch and came up with a very simple type system which aggregates a few values (name, id, type, ...). This type system is not hierarchical so no inheritance; you could implement it with a few classes in a OO language.

Also, nodes can host complex structure but do not expose it to the graph (edges are made only between nodes) and edge can be of n-arity. The system is regular enough to implement simple and complex lexicographic constructs easily as well as to use the graph in an actual application.

Issue with RDF et al if that before you start even working on your real data, you have to come up with an ontology, that is to describe the world in categories, which is not easy. Another problem is that a lot of projects want to define standards that works with everything. That's not realistic. So I took an approach where you can learn from your domain by working directly on your data, make something useful with it, and then expand it you need it. KISS.