Dear John, (01)
Your suggestions are very practical, IMHO. XML,
whether with or without RDF, is great for single
entity messages among computers in an N-tier
architecture, but JSON is far more reasonable in
volume transfer applications. (02)
For example, XML message events are sent back and
forth between common loan processing systems and
the title companies, and the bloat helps debug the
inevitable unexpected messages that contain odd
characters, undefined words, uncommon expressions
in English, etc. But the bloat is too great for
higher speed and higher volume transfers of data
among business partners; JSON is far more
appropriate there. (03)
-Rich (04)
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2 (05)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 9:11 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: [ontolog-forum] If you can't beat 'em,
join 'em. (06)
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 (07)
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. (08)
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/ (09)
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/ (010)
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. (011)
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. (012)
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. (013)
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.) (014)
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: (015)
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". (016)
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. (017)
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. (018)
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. (019)
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. (020)
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. (021)
John (022)
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