Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

Re:Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applica... by willberman on Friday February 28, 2020 @01:40AM (#22440966)

I've been following this lab's work for a while and actually suggested to them that the implementation for this be based on an RDF style data model. Ontology languages are the level of abstraction up from a spreadsheet and are an atomic unit in semantic web technologies. It looks like the way this fits in to the existing architecture is that the site adapters would extract data as RDF triples.

Professor Daniel Jackson runs this lab. His book, Design by Concept, is a phenomenal read. It made me understand why software can be so unintuitive for people who haven't grown accustomed to its idiosyncrasies that I've come to internalize.

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Re:Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applica... by jcelerier on Friday February 28, 2020 @03:50AM (#22441457)

Please don't bring RDF out of its coffin. It has been tried and failed because it's overly complex and verbose. It's terrible, and technologies which still use it are terrible to interact with to this day.

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Re:Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applica... by willberman on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:28AM (#22443378)

Interestingly enough I think that the core of rdf (the subject predicate object triple) is a quite elegant abstraction for knowledge graph representation.

I do agree that the layered system of different ontology languages as present in current semantic web standards is not beginner friendly, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be improved on.

I think you might be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

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Re:Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applica... by anchpop on Friday February 28, 2020 @02:08AM (#22441080)

Thanks for the recommendation, I just picked it up from amazon! I was expecting an expensive textbook but it's surprisingly cheap, only $6 for a paperback copy

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Re:Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applica... by gklitt on Friday February 28, 2020 @09:40AM (#22443038)

Just FYI, the version on Amazon is a draft preprint, and he's currently revising it towards the actual publication.

(But even the draft version is a fantastic read!)

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