Re:Ask HN: why isn't RDF more popular on HN?
by mcot2 on Saturday March 29, 2014 @10:09AM
(#7492259)
So that's not really solving any specific problem and it's kind of hand waving to say RDF solves data integration problems for data on the web.
Let's break it down a bit.
We learned early on that people put information on the web in different ways. Sometimes it's encapsulated within the UI, sometimes people come up with there own formats for things like contact info and comments.
So how do we make a system where everyone can understand everyone else's data across the web?
Instead of rigidly defined relational models... Where you would need a schema for every type of data... We will attempt to create a universal model consisting of subjects predicates and objects (triples) as the 'schema' for all data. This is essentially RDF.
Like most stuff coming from the w3c, they took a pretty good idea and made it needlessly complex with a terrible initial XML syntax and confusing specs. The first implementations were horribly slow for storage and querying. SQL people were laughing at this joke. There is no reason why this entire concept and a simple implementation can't fit on the same sized sheet of paper as the brilliant JSON spec.
Let's break it down a bit.
We learned early on that people put information on the web in different ways. Sometimes it's encapsulated within the UI, sometimes people come up with there own formats for things like contact info and comments.
So how do we make a system where everyone can understand everyone else's data across the web?
Instead of rigidly defined relational models... Where you would need a schema for every type of data... We will attempt to create a universal model consisting of subjects predicates and objects (triples) as the 'schema' for all data. This is essentially RDF.
Like most stuff coming from the w3c, they took a pretty good idea and made it needlessly complex with a terrible initial XML syntax and confusing specs. The first implementations were horribly slow for storage and querying. SQL people were laughing at this joke. There is no reason why this entire concept and a simple implementation can't fit on the same sized sheet of paper as the brilliant JSON spec.