It really amused me that people think "RDF never caught on" when it is the basis of so many major standards such as RSS, Adobe's XMP metadata, and, I just found out, ActivityPub.
I was working on a standards committee for years and made the discovery that you can turn most XML Schema Definitions into an OWL ontologies and thus automatically transform conforming XML documents into RDF documents.
(People had attempted this before but all the systems I saw were lossy or didn't make valid and decidable ontologies.)
For better and worse my write up[ is about to become one of those ISO standard documents that costs 166 swiss franc but it looks like I'll get the opportunity to apply this method to a major financial standard and release the software that does it as open source.
I'd contrast that to the truly awful RDF/XML spec where people never really understood where the XML stopped and the RDF began. It turned a lot of people off to RDF and people never got to see how easy it is with Turtle. Unfortunately JSON-LD hasn't got the love it deserves because it fixes most of the major problems with JSONs except for the lack of /* comments */ and you can frequently add a touch of JSON-LD to a JSON document you find on the street and get instant RDF you can query w/ SPARQL.
It looks like the W3C has started the process of a SPARQL 1.2 spec which could be a very good thing if it catches up with what is possible w/ document database query languages like N1QL, AQL and such.
> It really amused me that people think "RDF never caught on" when it is the basis of so many major standards such as RSS, Adobe's XMP metadata, and, I just found out, ActivityPub.
What does it mean to have caught on or not, though? How many RSS, XMP, ActivityPub implementations are actually considering things as triples and not just considering parent-child relationships within the XML tree?
I was working on a standards committee for years and made the discovery that you can turn most XML Schema Definitions into an OWL ontologies and thus automatically transform conforming XML documents into RDF documents.
(People had attempted this before but all the systems I saw were lossy or didn't make valid and decidable ontologies.)
For better and worse my write up[ is about to become one of those ISO standard documents that costs 166 swiss franc but it looks like I'll get the opportunity to apply this method to a major financial standard and release the software that does it as open source.
I'd contrast that to the truly awful RDF/XML spec where people never really understood where the XML stopped and the RDF began. It turned a lot of people off to RDF and people never got to see how easy it is with Turtle. Unfortunately JSON-LD hasn't got the love it deserves because it fixes most of the major problems with JSONs except for the lack of /* comments */ and you can frequently add a touch of JSON-LD to a JSON document you find on the street and get instant RDF you can query w/ SPARQL.
It looks like the W3C has started the process of a SPARQL 1.2 spec which could be a very good thing if it catches up with what is possible w/ document database query languages like N1QL, AQL and such.