Only slightly related bit does anyone have a good current take on how to get going on using RDF for something of value? I recently got interested through a colleague showing off his pet rdf setup, but the more I read the more I am just confused with the platora of dead/abandoned and renamed projects, different standards and tons of different shorter versions like this one. It really feels like everything on the topic is written both by and for people who have been active in the space continually since 2005, so for someone new it’s difficult to see where to start and what to avoid.
Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#22As 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 t…
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.
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?
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#23Only slightly related bit does anyone have a good current take on how to get going on using RDF for something of value? I recently got interested through a colleague showing off his pet rdf setup, but the more I read the more I am just confused with the platora of dead/abandoned and renamed projects, different standards and tons of different shorter versions like this one. It really feels like everything on the topic…
RDF is a zombie format. It isn't entirely "dead" but after some wildly ambitious promises, it hasn't lived up to any of them, and it seems only a few "true believers" are still working with it. This being a world of seven billion people, a few "true believers" can still be a few thousand people, but it's just not a technology I can say is vibrant, alive, or worth spending much time with. The core problem is that it solves the easy problems, and not even terribly well (I more-or-less endorse titanix2's comment elsewhere in the thread), while leaving the hard problems mostly untouched. The excitement it generated 10-15 years ago mostly comes from confusing solving the easy problem for the hard problem. Everything that I've personally ever seen used RDF has ripped it back out again at some point. Whether that's the fate in store for the current users named in the article I can't say, but it certainly wouldn't be a bad guess.
If the space intrigues you, I would suggest starting with a graph database instead.
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#24I've been developing a strongly-typed Ruby library for generating JSON-LD that might be interesting or useful: https://github.com/public-law/schema-dot-org
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#25Awesome stuff. I'm working with JSON-LD in both C# and JavaScript and loving the freedom that the linked data concepts (constraints) bring to developing APIs.
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#26As 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 t…
> 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.
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#27Blah. Some people just won't be happy until JSON turns into the debacle XML turned into. It's a special kind of brain problem to see a simple straightforward thing and to only consider how one might bolt on arbitrary complexity.
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#28Try leading with an explanation of why developers should care about JSON-LD. Its value is not obvious to me. According to the Wikipedia article [0] this is used by Google Knowledge Graph, but there's no other examples. Are there open source RDF processors? What are they used for? Previously I've used json-schema for documenting, validating, and testing a REST API. The tooling wasn't very good, but it worked alright.…
The main benefit in my eyes is data integration. If you have multiple systems with data, and you want to merge the data together into a unified whole for some reason then RDF/JSON-LD make it easy and mostly automatic.
For example: 1. How do you distinguish IDs from one system with those of another? RDF solves this. 2. How do you distinguish property names across systems? RDF solves this. 3. What if a entity originates in system A which you don’t control but you want to add a property to it in your system? RDF solves this.
JSON-LD is simply one way to serialize RDF data that makes look like what you would typically expect from an API that returns JSON. I.e. it’s developer friendly
In addition to the above, RDF is also an extraordinarily flexible/schemaless data model if you store your data as triples rather than as documents. There is definitely a steep learning curve to linked data, and I’ve had a hard time explaining it’s value over the years, but I think it’s worth the time to learn, understand, and leverage.
All of these benefits exist before you get into things like ontologies, which allows you to add additional value on top of what I outlined above.
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#29As 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 t…
> 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...
It provides a lot of benefits, see my other comment on this thread for a few specific benefits.
Re: Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
#30I guess I don't understand the purpose. If a high degree of formalization, typing and namespacing is required, why not use full-blown XML with namespaces and schemas?
A json-based format still has some advantages depending on context. E.g. JavaScript code can manipulate JSON data "natively" whereas XML support is far harder to achieve.