I think a big reason for lack of popularity is familiarity of graphs in general. Most people wouldn't know of a good graph editor I would guess. Everyone knows documents and spreadsheets/tables/lists/folders, but it's rare to see a graph anywhere. Online and offline. If I have to think about an example of a graph in real-life what comes to mind is: a corkboard with strings going between them to track a criminal in a tv show, or a subway network map. In VSCode/IntelliJ, there is not one graph I look at frequently, even though pretty much all code is a data flow and dependency graph.
I think part of this is that graphs always appear like a complicated mess, and we prefer hierarchies and categories.
I would really like a tool like Airtable for graphs. You start with spreadsheets with columns relating to other columns, and then you view the graph next to it as you go. I don't know of a popular tool that does this. It's funny because behind-the-scenes of spreadsheets there is always big dependency graph that updates cells as changes come through.
All the specs feel overly-complex too. Like a relic from the XML/SOAP days. For such a simple base concept (subject-predicate-object / entity-attribute-value) it feels like overkill. It's interesting though thinking about how JSON won, while being extremely inferior to XML. Although I think this ability to move fast has left us with a ton of untyped data lying around, and plenty of ad-hoc data transformations.
I'm interested to read into the EasierRDF doc you sent - looks very interesting.
> You start with spreadsheets with columns relating to other columns, and then you view the graph next to it as you go.
We are actually starting to crystalize something like that in our app. It's currently more read- than write-oriented but I think we are getting there. :)
> It's funny because behind-the-scenes of spreadsheets there is always big dependency graph that updates cells as changes come through.
Yup! Actually one dream that I have for our platform is that we'll build a Excel importer, that will import a fully fledged spreadsheet representation, including formulas that continue working (VBA macros excluded). Our platform does already support the core pieces required for this to work, there are just a ton of nitty gritty details to work out about how this would nicely integrate into the product in a way that isn't too cumbersome for our end-users.
> All the specs feel overly-complex too. Like a relic from the XML/SOAP days.
Oh, I could rant about that for days... RDF itself is already a bit weird in that aspect (the provide both the possibility to specify a datatype and a language tag, but not both at the same time to specify e.g. "German Markdown"). I don't think any comparable standard today would bake in localization on such a fundamental layer.
I think a big reason for lack of popularity is familiarity of graphs in general. Most people wouldn't know of a good graph editor I would guess. Everyone knows documents and spreadsheets/tables/lists/folders, but it's rare to see a graph anywhere. Online and offline. If I have to think about an example of a graph in real-life what comes to mind is: a corkboard with strings going between them to track a criminal in a tv show, or a subway network map. In VSCode/IntelliJ, there is not one graph I look at frequently, even though pretty much all code is a data flow and dependency graph.
I think part of this is that graphs always appear like a complicated mess, and we prefer hierarchies and categories.
I would really like a tool like Airtable for graphs. You start with spreadsheets with columns relating to other columns, and then you view the graph next to it as you go. I don't know of a popular tool that does this. It's funny because behind-the-scenes of spreadsheets there is always big dependency graph that updates cells as changes come through.
All the specs feel overly-complex too. Like a relic from the XML/SOAP days. For such a simple base concept (subject-predicate-object / entity-attribute-value) it feels like overkill. It's interesting though thinking about how JSON won, while being extremely inferior to XML. Although I think this ability to move fast has left us with a ton of untyped data lying around, and plenty of ad-hoc data transformations.
I'm interested to read into the EasierRDF doc you sent - looks very interesting.