Publishing JSON-LD for Developers
I&#x27;m working on language ressources and graphs and in my opinion, RDF is so flawed you shouldn&#x27;t even bother with it. I will address the topic during a conference in June (email me -- info in my profile -- for follow up or to get my articles if you&#x27;re interested by the topic). JSON-LD is trying to make RDF sexier (more exactly said, RDF try to pimp itself by using JSON-LD) but as it is just RDF with a new serialization syntax, it share every of its issues.<p>Main issues are:<p>- a literal node (strings which carry the useful information for an human) cannot be the source of an edge, so you end up creating &quot;resources&quot; nodes and pushing content as leaf of the graph. Access to its is thus done with a lot of indirections.<p>- no annotations, which mean you cannot represent simple graph construct such as a weighted edge.<p>- blank nodes, needed to join more than two piece of data which, are anonymous so they are difficult to reuse. That&#x27;s sad because a graph is supposed to make data link each other. Coupled with issue 1, it mean most linguistic resources graphs are actually closer to trees than real graphs.<p>- reliance on the web infrastructure (IRI, DNS, web servers, ...) which is a big dependency with a lot of gotchas and not fitted for every uses cases (self contained data for example)<p>- performances is abyssal. I tried one of the dictionary build on RDF, and some query took up to 40 seconds (!) to return no result. Even bloated web dictionaries perform under 2 seconds.<p>Also, the second sentence of the article is totally false. I read the history of JSON-LD by one of its main author [1], and it does not originated in the RDF community. It originated elsewhere, and then there was RDF people included in the loop.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;manu.sporny.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;json-ld-origins-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;manu.sporny.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;json-ld-origins-2&#x2F;</a>