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OpenGovLD / specs

Linked Data vocabulary and API for parliamentary and committee information systems
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Introduce specification with statement by Aaron Swartz #113

Open akuckartz opened 9 years ago

akuckartz commented 9 years ago

Aaron Swartz wrote this, which I think is is one of the best formulations of one of the main problems RDF and JSON-LD attempts to solve:

You see, all this JSON stuff is great for writing little scripts on clients that talk to other scripts on servers, but it leaves something to be desired when working at Web scale. It’s hard to imagine, for example, building particularly useful tools that work across different JSON APIs, the way web browsers work across all different kinds of HTML pages. Each JSON API has its own internal representations and conventions and protocols, which means you need to write special code to deal with each different one. That’s where RDF comes in. The idea behind it is simple: what if we had a format that did to data what HTML did to documents—provide a single, consistent representation for them that supports the hypertextual nature of the Web.

Aaron Swartz's A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00481ED1V01Y201302WBE005

akuckartz commented 9 years ago

And this is the end of that text:

It’s easy to make fun of these kinds of visions. My father, upon seeing such demos, always used to ask, “But why does your toaster need to know about stock prices?” And perhaps, ultimately, they’re not worth all the effort. But the Semantic Web is based on bet, a bet that giving the world tools to easily collaborate and communicate will lead to possibilities so wonderful we can scarcely even imagine them right now. Sure, it sounds a little bit crazy. But it paid off the last time they made that gamble: we ended up with a little thing called the World Wide Web. Let’s see if they can do it again.