Saturday, May 14, 2011

There is a world of statements out there

People that work with me have certainly heard "wow, I was smart" more than once. Typically I use this sentence when I am puzzled trying to understand some beautiful code I've written or designed a while ago. Now I am afraid that one day I will be saying it a lot if I ever need to look back at the technologies that I was focused on during my last years at IBM. Since 2009, I've been head down understanding the main pieces behind linked data:


I have to confess: these technologies are fantastic! Out of them, the one that I like the most is certainly RDF, probably because it's in the realm of models. Honestly though, I had a hard time understanding it at the beginning for I was seeing it with my old, schema-driven eyes. You know, for more than 15 years I trained myself to see the world as instances of rigid schemas, mainly formed by classes, attributes, and references. Alas, this way of thinking doesn't go well with RDF. If one is like I was, I'd suggest repeating "RDF is not just a new way to express a schema" at least every five minutes while trying to make some sense out of it.

My plan is to use the free time that I happen to have now to write down my thoughts about these technologies. Hopefully I will be able to register here what I refer to as my "linked data intuition": the small pieces of knowledge that I've assembled from various sources and that I now use to tackle any new RDF or REST challenge. For a second I've considered writing this on a personal document and store it away for future reference. How dumb is this? Putting the words here may benefit others and even allow people to correct me. Albeit pretentious, I like to believe that I know the stuff I am about to write ;-) But I wouldn't be surprised to be proven wrong. And that would be actually great: that's when one has an opportunity to reset and reflect about a topic again.

Looking forward to spending more time here in the next few days.

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