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WebThingsIO / schemas

A Web of Things schema repository
https://webthings.io/schemas/
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Convert the schema to an rdf representation #80

Open lu-zero opened 11 months ago

lu-zero commented 11 months ago

Right now, that I know, the schema exists only as a human-readable document, would be nice to have it in a machine parsable format as well (and derive the html from it)

benfrancis commented 11 months ago

Hi @lu-zero,

This has been discussed before.

Since WebThings parses Thing Descriptions as plain JSON and doesn't use an RDF parser anywhere, we never bothered to create an RDF-based representation because we had no use for it. However, I'd be happy to host one if someone wants to create it? Sebastian previously offered to have a student create one but I don't think it happened.

You'll note from the linked issue that unfortunately GitHub Pages (which is currently used to host the webthings.io website) doesn't support hosting both an HTML representation and JSON-LD representation of a resource at the same URL, or HTTP content negotiation. Apparently a common solution to that problem is to host the JSON-LD representation at a versioned URL like https://webthings.io/schemas/v1 and I'd be happy to do that. Unfortunately that wouldn't help with existing implementations using the current HTML URL.

lu-zero commented 11 months ago

I wanted to track its development in a separate issue since I like a lot the Webthings schemas and I'd see it used more widely.

(And I agree that the RDF representation is less needed in practice since most processors parse the additional terms only in their canonical form)