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w3c / EasierRDF

Making RDF easy enough for most developers
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Programming language support should be better quality #92

Open aucampia opened 2 years ago

aucampia commented 2 years ago

One of the biggest blockers I have to using RDF in industrial applications is that the library support is not of sufficient quality. I have been working a lot on the python rdflib but it is a hard slog to improve things, and there is a lot that still needs to be done, and for golang there is basically nothing that is actively maintained.

This results in a bit of a causality problem, the best way to get more resources to develop RDF tools and libraries is industrial usage, but this can only happen if existing tools are of higher quality.

afs commented 2 years ago

("language" means programming language or "language" meaning @langtags?)

@aucampia I hope you will contribute to projects to help improve them.

aucampia commented 2 years ago

("language" means programming language or "language" meaning @langtags?)

Updated the description now to clarify.

@aucampia I hope you will contribute to projects to help improve them.

I'm one of the top contributors to the python rdflib and I will continue to contribute to it. I have considered working on a golang library for RDF but right now I feel time would be better spent improving rdflib. I think however there is an issue of prioritization, my top and almost sole priority in contributing is to improve the quality of rdflib, and I think more of this is needed. But I'm also very concerned about whether or not I'm spending my time productively, as it seems that at the rate things are improving it would be almost a year before rdflib is in a state where I feel I can with clear conscious use it in a production setting.

Without high quality support in major programming languages like go and python RDF has little chance of making an impact, and I feel this is almost foundational to any other effort to make RDF more ubiquitous and accessible.

aucampia commented 2 years ago

I should maybe also clarify, this is maybe not universal. Java/JVM support for RDF is quite the outlier in my experience, it is significantly higher quality than python rdflib, but large swathes of the world is on python and go. If python rdflib was of equal quality to Jena and RDF4J I would not be that concerned to use it. Either way I will keep working on python rdflib to get it up to the same level of quality.

afs commented 2 years ago

Javascript support is good. Rust support is coming along nicely.

It would be nice to see more contributions from organisations that use RDF toolkits and frameworks (and, to be fair, that's generally true for a lot of open source ecosystems).