Blog post announcing CRAN release

[jeroen]

An initial version of jsonld is now on CRAN. For the blog post announcement it would be nice to have one or two real world examples of APIs that support jsonld and how you would use this.

I could also use some help describing what linked data is, and the general motivation behind json-ld, and how it might be useful for scientists.

/cc @sckott @cboettig

[karthik]

I think one nice example could be around combining different biodiversity data sources since that is our forte.

Other idea, which Carl would know better, is one from DataONE/KNB/Codemeta.

I'll try to think of more.

[sckott]

i imagine @cboettig has best grasp on linked data as a concept

for biodiversity APIs that use JSON-LD:

• EOL's traitbank API e.,g., http://eol.org/api/traits/328579
• i'll fill in some others ...

[cboettig]

Nice Scott, I think EOL traits are a pretty good illustration for JSON-LD, or at least of having a precise vocabulary and predictable shape to the data. (Unfortunately it looks like that example might not be a valid JSON-LD document? the json-ld/playground can't parse it -- @sckott would you know whom to bug at EOL about that?)

For starters, it's nice that you don't have to know exactly what this particular database decides to call a particular trait variable in order to use it, since it uses names from a global vocabulary (e.g. if you want the length of the whale, body length means precisely: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/VT_0001256, and you can ask for the OBO term for body-length, instead of having to remember that one database calls it "SVL" and another calls it "SnoutVentLength" and another simply "Length". Contrast this to fishbase where users constantly ask for what the name of the variable is for length or weight or blah blah and in what table they can find it.

Technically we could do more interesting queries on this too, including sparql queries (e.g. I want all body size related traits, (as defined by http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/VT_0100005, e.g. height, mass, length, width) rather than listing each of those traits separately, but that probably takes a bit more effort (can't play around with this example since the file doesn't parse..)

[sckott]

@cboettig unfortunately, EOL is not quick to respond or change anything, i'll try though

some others I can think of that have JSON-LD require auth. e.g,.

• DPLA - https://dp.la/info/developers/codex/requests/