Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
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Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
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Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#2As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format.
Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is.
To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an idealist, it's the perfect format for exposing all the structured data on the web in a machine readable form. The dream has always been for automatic agents to crawl the semantic web for you, understanding the meanings of the RDF triplets, and using them to reason out the solution to your query.
To a pragmatist, that dream has always sounded like a bunch of bull. Absent the presence of strong AI, it's a complete pipe dream that a piece of software will ever be able to infer the "semantic meaning" of interlinked RDF, just because it happens to be defined by triples. At the end of the day, you're going to have a programmer writing rules against specific terms in RDF, and if that's the case, than RDF is nothing more than an extremely awkward API.
Fortunately for the web, the pragmatists won. APIs are everywhere, and RDF is nowhere.
Unless strong AI happens to be right around the corner, the web dodged a real bullet there. Personally, I'm of the opinion that any web agent that could possibly puzzle through RDF triplets should have no problem understanding our APIs, in any case.
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#3As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
Not quite. While RDF certainly isn't all that the idealists claim, you can still get some benefit of it without strong AI.
Mainly, it provides a consistent model for handling the notion of a "field". Non-RDF apis typically return fielded JSON or XML, the structure of which is only specified within the documentation. In order to integrate two services not originally designed to inter-operate, you have to write lots of custom glue code.
RDF is at least amenable to writing generic "rules" to govern field mapping and inference, rather than one-off glue code (which usually ends up being a hacky script). So sure, if you're integrating one service, a hacky script is probably easier. But if you want a coherent system for integrating large numbers of services not originally designed to inter-operate, RDF makes things a lot easier.
So there's some benefit, even if it isn't as dramatic as its proponents claim.
Plus, there's the fact that while strong AI isn't yet on the horizon, RDF is a lot easier for weak AI (inference engines, data mining, etc) to ingest, and weak AI is getting better all the time.
Actually, one of the biggest problems with RDF, to my mind, is that it's structure makes it very difficult to get good performance with truly large numbers of subjects and attributes - and unfortunately that's just the area where it'd be most useful.
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#4As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
Personally, I'm of the opinion that any web agent that could possibly puzzle through RDF triplets should have no problem understanding our APIs, in any case.
…or native human language.
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#5As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
APIs are everywhere, and RDF is nowhere.
RDF is hardly ubiquitous, but it's also hardly appropriate to say that it's nowhere. RDFa in particular has seen a big surge in adoption over the last year or two, especially after Google and Yahoo announced that they would start utilizing RDFa.
http://tripletalk.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/rdfa-deployment-a...
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#6As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
Not quite. While RDF certainly isn't all that the idealists claim, you can still get some benefit of it without strong AI. Mainly, it provides a consistent model for handling the notion of a "field". Non-RDF apis typically return fielded JSON or XML, the structure of which is only specified within the documentation. In order to integrate two services not originally designed to inter-operate, you have to write lots of…
My claim is that your "generic rules" to govern mapping fields are actually equivalent to hardcoding the names of JSON fields. Instead of seeing "title", and deciding what to do with the data, you see:
In both cases, instead of having a machine understand the (semantic) structure of the data, you have a programmer writing a rule.
Can you provide a concrete example of where this isn't the case, and your RDF-reader is simpler than reading the equivalent (well-designed) JSON of the same data?
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#7As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
Not quite. While RDF certainly isn't all that the idealists claim, you can still get some benefit of it without strong AI. Mainly, it provides a consistent model for handling the notion of a "field". Non-RDF apis typically return fielded JSON or XML, the structure of which is only specified within the documentation. In order to integrate two services not originally designed to inter-operate, you have to write lots of…
I've also experienced performance issues with RDF stores, but over the last few years, that has increased a lot and I think in another 1-2 years there will be a bunch of stores that are able to handle reasonable large numbers of triples with a good performance.
Aside from that I think, although RDF might not be the 'holy grail', it is in fact quite usable for a lot of problem domains and saying that it needs to be discarded is a bit harsh :)
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#8As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
APIs are everywhere, and RDF is nowhere. RDF is hardly ubiquitous, but it's also hardly appropriate to say that it's nowhere. RDFa in particular has seen a big surge in adoption over the last year or two, especially after Google and Yahoo announced that they would start utilizing RDFa. http://tripletalk.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/rdfa-deployment-a...
To continue to play devil's advocate here ... if RDF is just an awkward API, RDFa is just an awkward microformat.
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#9As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
Not quite. While RDF certainly isn't all that the idealists claim, you can still get some benefit of it without strong AI. Mainly, it provides a consistent model for handling the notion of a "field". Non-RDF apis typically return fielded JSON or XML, the structure of which is only specified within the documentation. In order to integrate two services not originally designed to inter-operate, you have to write lots of…
So sure, if you're integrating one service, a hacky script is probably easier. But if you want a coherent system for integrating large numbers of services not originally designed to inter-operate, RDF makes things a lot easier.
Exactly. If one thinks of RDF (and associated technologies) as having an aim of creating a Semantic Web as one big, decentralized, federated database, then you can really see the value in it.
For any one random website to expose some data for people to use, it's a fair argument that RDF is more awkward than just dumping the data out over an HTTP API as generic XML, JSON, CSV or whatever. But when you look at the bigger picture, RDF becomes desirable.
Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?
#10As a preamble, when RDF was conceived, databases drove many sites on the web, but their data tended to only be exposed as HTML, instead of a more machine-friendly format. Now, there are two perspectives on what RDF is. To an idealist, RDF is the universal data format. There are no semantics baked-in, and you can write arbitrary subject -> predicate -> object triplets to express any possible relationship. To an ideali…
APIs are everywhere, and RDF is nowhere. RDF is hardly ubiquitous, but it's also hardly appropriate to say that it's nowhere. RDFa in particular has seen a big surge in adoption over the last year or two, especially after Google and Yahoo announced that they would start utilizing RDFa. http://tripletalk.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/rdfa-deployment-a...
#2
there are also more and more RDF datasets (http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/lodcloud/) published, so at least some people seem to think it is a good format.