[Geojson] Interesting comparison of JSON and RDF
chris goad
chris at platial.com
Fri Jul 27 08:26:20 PDT 2007
Hi Allan, Sean,
>> I've never felt that GeoJSON should be put forward as a general
>> purpose
>> interchange format, and that's why I've resisted the RDF-isms of JDIL.
>
I wasn't proposing that GeoJSON itself be formulated as a general purpose
format, but rather that minor GeoJSON details should adjusted to allow its
use in a more general context. This is analogous to the GeoRSS GEO
primitives being defined in such a way that they can appear within an RSS
feed - allowing people who want to make geographical assertions about their
content to do so even if their content mentions things other than geography.
Concretely speaking, at Platial we use JSON as a basis for sending various
kinds of information around (commentary, photos, specialized data about
particular topics), and need something that we can mix in to carry the geo
content.
In reply to Allan's comments:
The art of mixing data from different sources is not arcane, nor is it
intrinsically tied to notions of semantic nirvana - though it may seem to
be to listen to some hype. The technical notions are trivial: 1) avoid name
collisions by using long names (URIs) instead of short ones; 2) to deal with
the resulting versbosity, define abbreviations (namespaces). This is old hat
in the XML world, and JDIL is an attempt to transplant this simple but
useful hack into JSON.
As evidence that data-mixing and namespaces are not just an affectation of
the semantic faithful, the Google Data APIs which provide access to Google
Base, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Picasa Web Albums etc use namespaces-per-app
to mix the data from these applications into Atom or JSON feeds. (If that's
not mainstream what is?)
GEO in particular can benefit hugely from data mixing - geographic features
always have non-geographic attributes that are of central interest to one
community or another : the strength as well as position of earthquakes, the
menu as well as address of a restaurant. IMHO, Geo format designers should
consider how best to fit into more general information flows rather than
how best to sequester their format in its purity!
BTW, we will be using GeoJSON at platial - but might need to sully it with
the occaisonal "@"
Final note: I commented on
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/the_limitations_of_json - trying to show
that JSON isn't limited after all for the purpose of transporting RDF - if
one should wish to do that. Thanks for posting the link.
-- Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Allan Doyle" <adoyle at eogeo.org>
To: <geojson at lists.geojson.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 2:30 PM
Subject: Re: [Geojson] Interesting comparison of JSON and RDF
>
> On Jul 26, 2007, at 11:13 , Sean Gillies wrote:
>
>> You may have read this already, else open it in a new tab and read it
>> when you get a chance.
>>
>> http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/the_limitations_of_json
>>
>> I've never felt that GeoJSON should be put forward as a general
>> purpose
>> interchange format, and that's why I've resisted the RDF-isms of JDIL.
>
> I agree that GeoJSON isn't targeted at being a general purpose
> interchange format. However, I also cringe every time I read
> something like that blog posting.
>
> People keep thinking that if they only add a little more notation,
> they will achieve semantic nirvana where there is no out-of-band
> information needed and everything can just grok everything else.
> Sure, adding namespaces like foaf: helps you along the way, but how
> do people ever get anything done once they start indirecting
> everything? It seems to me that the trend is towards late-binding so
> that one doesn't have to commit immediately to nailing things down.
> To truly achieve a semantic web, the binding may have to be
> infinitely late. In the meantime, the early-binding constructs are
> out there doing useful things.
>
> I think GeoJSON as is, or maybe even with the feature e stuff pulled
> out is a fine piece of work and we should not be lulled into thinking
> that just one more little bit of notation won't be so bad.
>
> Maybe it's because I started out life as a hardware designer. I feel
> that when you're done, you should have something pretty self-
> contained that just works, preferably in a deterministic way. Or
> maybe I've ossified to the point where I just don't get it and the
> young-uns will have to just move ahead without me.
>
> Allan
>
>>
>> Sean
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Geojson at lists.geojson.org
>> http://lists.geojson.org/listinfo.cgi/geojson-geojson.org
>
> --
> Allan Doyle
> +1.781.433.2695
> adoyle at eogeo.org
>
>
>
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