◆ Semantic Web Catalogue

Design issue

Usability

Can ordinary developers and people use it?

tension
Rigour against approachability: what a specification makes possible against what a working developer will actually pick up.
also
Developer experience, Ease of use, Learnability
scheme
design issues

Threads (2)

Long-running problems under this issue, told step by step. All threads.

  • Can ordinary developers use it? 1987–2024 open 12 steps

    Can people who are not specialists build with linked data, or does it stay a tool for experts?

  • Rigour against developer taste 1998–2015 largely settled 10 steps

    What does a data format have to look like before ordinary web developers will use it?

Who answered it

This issue's row of the map: which traditions' works mainly answer it, and the earliest from each.

traditionworksearliest
Hypertext 1 HyperCard 1987
Knowledge representation
Databases
Machine learning 1 SPINACH: SPARQL-Based Information Navigation for Challenging Real-World Questions 2024
Web standards 5 JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web 2014
Search 1 JSON web APIs
Social web
Open knowledge
Decentralized web
Libraries, archives and museums 1 Linked Art 2016
Life sciences
Media
Geospatial
Commerce and supply chain
Government and law
Finance
Industry and engineering

5 of 17 traditions have taken up this question as a work's main issue; a work in several traditions counts in each. Same counts as the full map.

Timeline

Works on this question, its main or a secondary one, each shown once in date order; filter by tradition to follow one community. Bars run from start to end where both are known; marks people, projects and organizations still active. 1 entry has no date and is not shown. Hover over or focus an entry to draw its links. Scroll sideways, or use the decades above.

Lineage (7)

Works whose main question this is, by type, oldest first.

Concepts 1

  • JSON web APIs concept technique

    Plain JSON over HTTP with each API defining its own fields, without shared vocabularies or global identifiers; the everyday alternative most developers chose over Linked Data.

Writings 3

  • JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web 2014 writing ★ seminal debate

    Manu Sporny's January 2014 blog post, written days after JSON-LD became a W3C Recommendation, saying that better Web APIs, not the Semantic Web, motivated JSON-LD, and that keeping RDF out of sight was what made it usable.

  • Toward easier RDF: a proposal 2018 writing debate

    David Booth's November 2018 message to the W3C semantic-web list arguing that the whole RDF ecosystem, from SPARQL and OWL to tools, is too hard for average developers, the middle third by ability, and that education had not fixed it in fifteen years; it began the EasierRDF effort on GitHub.

  • SPINACH: SPARQL-Based Information Navigation for Challenging Real-World Questions 2024 writing technique

    2024 paper by Liu, Semnani, Triedman, Xu, Zhao and Lam with a dataset of real questions from Wikidata's 'Request a Query' forum, where users ask others to write SPARQL for them, and a language-model agent that writes such queries the way an expert would.

Standards 2

  • Linked Data Platform 2015 standard

    W3C Recommendation of 26 February 2015 setting rules for reading and writing Linked Data with ordinary HTTP operations, so resources and containers behave like a familiar REST API; Solid builds on it.

  • Linked Art 2016 standard

    Community profile of the CIDOC CRM for describing artworks and other heritage objects, in JSON-LD and using the Getty Vocabularies, so that museum data is practical for developers; started in 2016.

Projects 1

  • HyperCard 1987–2004 project ★ seminal

    Apple's programmable card-and-stack application for the Macintosh, written by Bill Atkinson. It put linked, scriptable documents in the hands of ordinary users.

Also bears on this (11)

Writings 3

Standards 6

  • Microformats 2005 standard ★ seminal

    Conventions for marking up people, events, reviews and similar data with plain HTML class names, without a separate data format.

  • GeoJSON 2008 standard

    JSON format for geographic features, first specified by a community group in 2008 and standardised as RFC 7946 in August 2016, which dropped other coordinate systems in favour of WGS 84 alone; the developers' favourite, with no RDF in it.

  • International Image Interoperability Framework 2012 standard ★ seminal

    Shared web APIs for digitised images, proposed in late 2011 by research libraries including the British Library, Stanford, the Bodleian and the BnF. Its Image API (2012) serves zoomable images, and its Presentation API (2013) describes books and artworks as JSON-LD manifests, so any viewer can show any library's images.

  • JSON-LD 2014 standard ★ seminal

    JSON-based syntax for Linked Data that lets ordinary JSON be read as RDF; a W3C Recommendation since January 2014.

  • Turtle 2014 standard

    Compact text syntax for writing RDF triples by hand, widely used long before it became a W3C Recommendation in February 2014.

  • Web of Things Thing Description 2020 standard

    W3C Recommendation of 9 April 2020 that describes a device's properties, actions and events in JSON that can be read as JSON-LD, so applications can work across Internet of Things platforms.

Projects 2

  • Protégé 1987 project

    Free ontology editor from Stanford University, widely used to build OWL ontologies.

  • Semantic MediaWiki 2005 project

    Extension to MediaWiki that lets wiki pages carry typed, queryable data annotations.

People and organizations (15)

Linked to works on this question; the number counts those works.

Apple · Ashok Malhotra · Bill Atkinson · David Booth · Harold Triedman · Isaac Dan Zhao · Jialiang Xu · John Arwe · Manu Sporny · Monica S. Lam · Robert Cailliau · Shicheng Liu · Sina J. Semnani · Steve Speicher · World Wide Web Consortium