Jeni's Musings

A couple of weeks ago I did a talk at the TPAC Plenary Day about why RDF hasn’t had the uptake that it might and what could be done about it.

I felt quite uncomfortable about doing this for many reasons. The predominant one is that I’m well aware that the world is made by the people who turn up. It is far far easier to snipe from the sidelines than it is to put in the effort to attend telcons and face-to-face meetings, to engage on mailing lists, to write specifications and implementations and tutorials.

On the other hand, what I hope is that the perspective of someone who is outside that process, someone who tries to understand and interpret and use the results of that process, might be valuable. And so I aimed to provide that honestly.

In that spirit, I’m going to put my stake in the ground and say that there are three areas where I think W3C should be concentrating its efforts:

1. standardising (something like) TriG — Turtle plus named graphs
2. standardising an API for the RDF data model
3. standardising a path language for RDF that can be used by that API and others for easy access

and that it should specifically not put its efforts into standardising another syntax for RDF based on JSON.