Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?

#41

Post by jerf » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:14 PM UTC

haberman wrote: post #40

jerf wrote: post #23

Many people here are answering the question of why RDF sucks, but that was not the question asked. The question is why this suckage has still not managed to bury the technology. There is a very frequent problem people suffer from, which is mistaking goals for results. When you start looking for it, you'll see it a lot. A new open source NoSQL database will pop up, post a long list of goals ("Fastest performance, main…

Great point. I think another example is XML. It was going to free us from proprietary, binary data formats by making everything nice and understandable pointy brackets. Everyone understands things written in pointy brackets, right? The reality is that we got OOXML and ODF, which are so enormously complex that no piece of software except Microsoft Word and OpenOffice could hope to fully implement them. If there was an…

I would agree. XML is like OO, it's actually still useful in some cases, but if you don't have marked-up textual content you're probably doing it wrong. I wonder what fraction of XML in the world is actually marked-up textual content, rather than data masquerading as marked up text?

Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?

#42

Post by szany » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:39 PM UTC

stevenbedrick wrote: post #20

donohoe wrote: post #11

Hands up anyone who uses RDF (when they could choose to do otherwise)? Anyone? Bueller?

Plenty of people (including myself) in biomedical fields (especially in bioinformatics, although I know of numerous medically-oriented users) use RDF for a variety of purposes- it's a fabulously flexible way to express and encode complex data models. With a little bit of coordination regarding semantics (OWL, etc.), it's also a great way for people in related but distinct fields to share their data with one another.…

Have you found any good introductions?

Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?

#43

Post by stevenbedrick » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 7:46 PM UTC

szany wrote: post #42

stevenbedrick wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people (including myself) in biomedical fields (especially in bioinformatics, although I know of numerous medically-oriented users) use RDF for a variety of purposes- it's a fabulously flexible way to express and encode complex data models. With a little bit of coordination regarding semantics (OWL, etc.), it's also a great way for people in related but distinct fields to share their data with one another.…

Have you found any good introductions?

Personally, I found Antoniou & van Harmelen's "A Semantic Web Primer" to be very useful. I felt like it covered a lot of ground at just the right level- enough to explain what was going on and why, but not so much that it got bogged down in pointless detail. However, YMMV- I know some people who didn't care for it.

It's a little bit dated at this point, but Shelley Powers' "Practical RDF" was also helpful- but, again, I got a lot more out of it once I'd read Antoniou and had internalized the whole RDF thing at a "30,000 foot" level.

BTW, I just Googled for the Antoniou book to make sure I had remembered its authors correctly, and it turns out that one of the first results is a PDF version of the entire text. I don't know what it's doing up online, but grab it while it's hot. If it's helpful, Powell's has a couple of used copies:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780262012423-2

Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?

#44

Post by arto » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 11:07 PM UTC

szany wrote: post #42

stevenbedrick wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people (including myself) in biomedical fields (especially in bioinformatics, although I know of numerous medically-oriented users) use RDF for a variety of purposes- it's a fabulously flexible way to express and encode complex data models. With a little bit of coordination regarding semantics (OWL, etc.), it's also a great way for people in related but distinct fields to share their data with one another.…

Have you found any good introductions?

This is a good quick overview of RDF for programmers: http://rdfabout.com/quickintro.xpd

Re: Why is RDF so old, complicated, unpopular and still not discarded?

#45

Post by _mql » Fri, Feb 04, 2011, 9:11 AM UTC

A major problem with RDF is that it is almost impossible to build applications on top of it. You'd need another layer of abstraction to handle the complexity.

I really like the approach Freebase takes. It’s a proprietary format, basically. They use JSON rather than XML and they have their own query language MQL (also expressed using JSON). However their graph of entities maps to RDF as well, so they use RDF (along with common ontologies) as an export format. I think while their system is still complex under the hood, it’s less verbose, less scientific, and more user-friendly w.r.t. the public interface. And most important, thanks to MQL it's super easy to build applications on top of it.

---

For me modeling data as a graph (as RDF proposes) is a really great idea! What I always wanted to do is building client applications (single-page web apps) that can operate on a graph of data directly (instead of talking to a REST service). That's why I'm putting efforts in the creation of Data.js, which features a Data.Graph that can be manipulated in JavaScript environments (like the browser or Node.js). Such Data.Graphs can be persisted (synced) at any time. There's support for CouchDB as a backend.

Well, in the README I also pointed out why I decided not to use RDF and instead took inspiration from the Metaweb Object Model (that Freebase uses).

https://github.com/michael/data

I'd enjoy some feedback btw. The lib is actually working, but the examples are out of date. Have a look at the source or ping me if you want to try it out.