On 12/6/11 12:11 PM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Schema.org can be viewed as a threat or an opportunity for the
> Semantic Web. It was founded by a collaboration of Google,
> Microsoft (Bing), and Yahoo! as an alternative to RDF or RDFa
> for tagging web pages. See http://schema.org/docs/faq.html
>
> With that backing and with the simplicity of the schema.org
> notation, the adoption rate of schema.org has been faster
> than RDFa and much, much faster than RDF/XML. Some people
> have considered that a threat to the Semantic Web.
>
> But a new web site provides a mapping of the full schema.org
> type hierarchy to JSON and four notations for RDF: XML,
> N3, Turtle, and NTriples. See http://schema.rdfs.org/
>
> Of those notations, JSON is the most humanly readable and
> the most computationally efficient. JSON is the native data
> format of JavaScript, and mappings have been defined to all
> the major programming languages. See http://www.json.org/
>
> The original RDF/XML was a disaster for humans and for computers.
> It is horribly inefficient for computation, and the native XML
> tools that process it are too slow for critical applications.
> For that reason, its adoption rate has been glacially slow.
>
> The rapid adoption rate of schema.org and the JSON notation
> should be a wake-up call for the Semantic Web. R. V. Guha,
> the original designer of RDF, said that he "wished" he could
> have used LISP notation for RDF. The JSON notation is
> essentially LISP with brackets and curly braces.
>
> The schema.rdfs.org web site is useful for showing how the
> Semantic Web tools can interoperate with schema.org. But
> anybody who compares JSON to the RDF notations will have
> no incentive to adopt any version of RDF.
>
> For these reasons, Schema.org and the JSON notation are the
> wave of the future. The W3C cannot compete with Google,
> Microsoft, Yahoo!, and other companies that are joining the
> consortium. (One example is the Russian search company
> Yandex, which is now translating the vocabulary.)
>
> To avoid sinking into irrelevance, the Semantic Web must do
> more than specify a way to migrate from XML notation to JSON.
> Even declaring JSON to be an alternative is not sufficient.
> A modest proposal:
>
> 1. Phase out RDF/XML as the official base for RDF. There is
> no need to say that it's "deprecated". A softer term would
> be IBM's euphemism "functionally stabilized".
>
> 2. Adopt JSON notation as the official base, but define a formal
> semantics for JSON. Pat Hayes collaborated with Guha to define
> the logic base (LBase) for RDF. Pat also worked on the ISO
> project for Common Logic (CL) and defined the CL model theory
> as an upward compatible extension to LBase. Define the JSON
> semantics by a mapping to CLIF (Common Logic Interchange Format).
> CLIF uses a LISP-like notation that has an almost one-to-one
> mapping from JSON.
>
> 3. Use the CL semantics to define other useful logic languages
> as extensions to JSON. One example would be a version of OWL
> that uses JSON. Another would be a rule language that uses
> a Horn-clause subset of CL with a syntax based on JavaScript.
>
> 4. The option of writing N-tuples in JSON can support a direct
> mapping to and from the tables of a relational database.
> The rule language could include a version of Datalog to state
> SQL queries, constraints, and updates. The types defined by
> schema.org would be a valuable enhancement to SQL.
>
> Common Logic is very expressive, and it is not necessary for the
> Semantic Web tools to implement theorem provers for the full
> ISO 24707 standard. However, it would be possible to extend
> the JSON-based notation to support the full CL semantics.
>
> In fact, the W3C could work with ISO to include a JSON-based
> dialect in the next update to the 24707 standard. A collaboration
> of ISO, W3C, and the major web companies could establish the
> Semantic Web as a solid foundation for mainstream applications.
>
> John
>
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> (01)
I think it's a wrap then :-) (02)
Great post! (03)
-- (04)
Regards, (05)
Kingsley Idehen
Founder& CEO
OpenLink Software
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