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LDflex: A Read/Write Linked Data Abstraction for Front-End Web Developers

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The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020 (ISWC 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12507))

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Abstract

Many Web developers nowadays are trained to build applications with a user-facing browser front-end that obtains predictable data structures from a single, well-known back-end. Linked Data invalidates such assumptions, since data can combine several ontologies and span multiple servers with different . Front-end developers, who specialize in creating end-user experiences rather than back-ends, thus need an abstraction layer to the Web of Data that integrates with existing frameworks. We have developed , a domain-specific language that exposes common Linked Data access patterns as reusable JavaScript expressions. In this article, we describe the design and embedding of the language, and discuss its daily usage within two companies. eliminates a dedicated data layer for common and straightforward data access patterns, without striving to be a replacement for more complex cases. The use cases indicate that designing a Linked Data developer experience—analogous to a user experience— is crucial for adoption by the target group, who in turn create Linked Data apps for end users. Crucially, simple abstractions require research to hide the underlying complexity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/simplerdf/simplerdf.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/rubensworks/rdf-object.js.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/NoelDeMartin/soukai-solid.

  4. 4.

    The unabridged interview text is at https://ruben.verborgh.org/iswc2020/ldflex/interviews/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.janeirodigital.com/.

  6. 6.

    https://inrupt.com/.

  7. 7.

    https://startinblox.com/.

  8. 8.

    https://happy-dev.fr/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Tim Berners-Lee for his suggestion to build a “jQuery for ”. We thank James Martin and Justin Bingham from Janeiro Digital and Sylvain Le Bon and Matthieu Fesselier from Startin’blox for their participation in the interviews.

This research received funding from the Flemish Government under the “Onderzoeksprogramma Artificiële Intelligentie (AI) Vlaanderen” program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IDLab, Department of Electronics and Information Systems, Ghent University – imec, Ghent, Belgium

    Ruben Verborgh & Ruben Taelman

Authors
  1. Ruben Verborgh
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  2. Ruben Taelman
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Correspondence to Ruben Verborgh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Jeff Z. Pan

  2. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Valentina Tamma

  3. University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Claudia d’Amato

  4. University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Krzysztof Janowicz

  5. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Bo Fu

  6. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Axel Polleres

  7. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA

    Oshani Seneviratne

  8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Lalana Kagal

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Verborgh, R., Taelman, R. (2020). LDflex: A Read/Write Linked Data Abstraction for Front-End Web Developers. In: Pan, J.Z., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020. ISWC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12507. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62466-8_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62466-8_13

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