[openbiblio-dev] bibjson -request for feedback

[Jim Pitman]

Mark MacGillivray <mark.macgillivray at okfn.org> wrote:

> http://openbiblio.net/2012/02/21/json-ld-bibjson/

Thanks Mark, this initiates an important discussion.

Generally, I think 
1) we should support namespaces, and 
2) we should offer a simple default namespace, like what we are using now,
which will be adequate for most purposes. 

Anyone with special needs can then construct their own namespace.

A notion of namespaces was provided in the the original BibJSON spec through what was called 
there a Linkage Schema.  I couldnt quickly find the link to the original spec beneath 
http://bibjson.org/.  Please could you post that beneath bibjson.org and forward the link 
to the list?  It should be instructive to compare/contrast the original BJ spec with 
http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld-syntax/ 
The original BJ spec was some attempt to emulate that W3C style. 
I'm not sure how far we need to bend in that direction to keep up momentum with BibJSON dev. 
Clearly there is some cost in doing so.  
Peter can you comment on that tradeoff from your experience?
I'm not pressing to revert to the old spec, but it would be timely to review 
the functionality provided there, fairly unobtrusively as I recall, to map common terms 
to formal namespaces, and decide if that would be adequate namespace support.


My main question, is what do we gain from JSON-LD, rather than a simpler
JSON format we like better, which may be enough to map to JSON-LD if that gains traction?
Are there examples of substantial datasets in JSON-LD?
Well supported tools for import/export from other formats?

If JSON-LD is rich enough to contain all we need, and not so complex it slows us down,
we could go for it, and try to generate some interest from the JSON-LD community 
in BibJSON as JSON-LD. However, I have been burned before by premature attempts at RDF-ization 
of what should be kept sofar as possible a simple record format. If LD brings us real 
rewards, then maybe, but if not I am wary.

> Our next project sprint is on March 12th, where we will be updating
> parsers, so final decision will be made and implemented then, and
> pushed to the repo and to bibsoup.net

Seems like a good timeline.

--Jim
----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

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