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Comment by mcot2 | Hacker News Reader

I've been involved with RDF in a major way before, around 2008. My experiences back then were pretty horrible, but I would be willing to give it another look.

Primary I dispise the Java and XML ecosystems and am way more interested in document, graph and columnar datastores these days.

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That's a huge misconception. XML has nothing to do with RDF. It's merely a serialization. Please take a look at JSON-LD, it's another serialization of RDF. Or perhaps Turtle which is more human-readable. Or HDT which is a binary format of RDF making it extremely compact.

I've met lots of people that thought that RDF was something you could do with XML and along came all the despise they already had for XML. But it's not, RDF is essentially all about expressing and modelling data as statements of triples.

And this allows for all kinds of interesting interoperability scenarios such as data integration.

I know all of those things. But it is still the case that the initial serialization format was XML and most of the initial tools were Java.

Indeed the initial tools were a mess it's true. But they've grown a lot. There's a lot to choose now. From interactive tools, to performance improvements with really interesting things like HDT. The whole situation is much better.

I understand your grief with RDF's past, but please consider judging the actual things RDF currently brings to the table.

Otherwise it's like saying that HTML was initially very cumbersome and, simply because of that, you're willing to dismiss all the cool things happening with HTML5 nowadays.

> Otherwise it's like saying that HTML was initially very cumbersome and, simply because of that, you're willing to dismiss all the cool things happening with HTML5 nowadays.

But HTML wasn't cumbersome. It wasn't (isn't) the most elegant format either, but it was simple and fun to use, people were excited and enthusiastic about it and published their pages. IMO, these early adopters were critical for making the critical mass that eventually led to the WWW explosion.

If you make the parallel -- that critical mass has never happened with the Semantic Web / Linked Data. How many Linked Data people are really eating their dog food and using RDF today? A way too little, and that's what matters.

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