Thanks for your comment on it by the way. I'm still in the phase of gathering what everyone thinks of it. I've noticed that RDF seems a bit polarizing. I have the suspicion that people who feel neutral about it also don't feel the need to chime in.
I like the idea - kinda back to a decentralised web of peers like it was in the early days.
However the complexity of the technology is certainty off-putting - I'm not enough of an expert to tell how much of that complexity is adherence to a tech stack ( like RDF, SPARQL ) and how much is simply the complexity of the underlying problem.
I would say the guys behind it seem fairly pragmatic. As an example while the technology allows you to self host, they acknowledge that most people won't be able/want to - and are looking to enable providers as well.
I think one of the problems with the LD/RDF community is it can attract the type of person that things 'we just need a single well defined data model for the universe'.
I think trying to get one schema to rule them all is doomed to failure - for two reasons
- for ontologies to be effective all the users of that ontology have to have a shared understanding of the ontology - simple a written down definition isn't enough.
- the world can be viewed from multiple angles - even if you could agree one view, it's not going to be optimal for all use cases.
However as I said, the SOLID project doesn't appear to be falling into that trap - it appears very focused and pragmatic.
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.
Since you're quite an eloquent defender of RDF in this thread -- would you mind sharing a bit of RDF from your project? If it's not public or finished yet ... perhaps pasting an excerpt on gist.github.com?
I see a lot of RDF bashing. Particularly from the "Web 2.0" crowd. It has warts, no doubt (is anything borne of the human mind without warts?), but it also has its strengths. A lot of people say it is a failed technology but it's less the failure of the technology and more a failure of the people saying so to properly understand what it can/does do.
Is that a failure of the technology? Because most people don't understand what they would use it for or how they would apply it? I don't think so. I think the claims that it would change the web were high-flown. I also think its creators did a bad job of explaining it. However, you'll find the people that do understand it and have a domain in which it is clearly applicable - love it.
One of my friends works for the library at UCSD and they use RDF, RDFS, and OWL-DL extensively - I couldn't even imagine doing what she does with the library's book ontology using JSON (as some have proposed replace XML and it's vocabularies, even with a JSON "schema" language). I have another friend working for a biotech company - and he uses it there, extensively. These are only two examples and it excludes the other web projects and companies out there that also use it and it's higher level vocabularies/ontologies (UMBEL, etc...).
Is it a failure for the web? (a topic in another thread a few days ago) I don't think it is, I think it is a failure on the part of developers to understand it and apply it (Drupal has applied it).
Does anyone actually use RDF? The W3C seems to love it, but I can't help but feel it's one of those technologies that just fell through the cracks and failed to gain any users.
To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. The tooling that exists - at least in the open source space - seems to be vastly dominated by Java and academic endeavours. That being said, I think the ideas behind RDF are pretty awesome, and its simplistic structure makes full indexing, datalog inference and layering possible.
Yeah, I touched on RDF in my post. I have some experience with it, but it is pretty complex for just data. I think it is powerful, but the thing that makes the web work is simplicity.
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