Call for Participation in Declarative Linked Data Apps Community Group

The Declarative Linked Data Apps Community Group has been launched:

The mission of this group is to produce a specification that describes how Web and Linked Data applications can be built using declarative technologies only, minimizing the need for source code. A draft Linked Data Templates specification has been submitted by AtomGraph.

Current software development models involve writing source code (mostly in imperative languages) and building programs from it. Source code is prone to bugs, and managing it requires developers. The declarative approach is instead to push as much application logic from source code to data, so that the application can be managed and reused as data itself, while the software becomes generic and application-independent.

This approach is related to functional languages and to processing pipelines. The generic software works as a processor: it takes the incoming request and the declarative application description and runs it through a pipeline, first retrieving the state of the requested resource (or changing it) and then rendering it into the requested format, such as a Web page. This is similar to an XSLT processor transforming XML documents.

AtomGraph provides open-source Linked Data components for Linked Data API as well as end-user application building. They support any SPARQL 1.1-compatible datasource and seamlessly combine multiple declarative technologies:

• Linked Data Templates
• URI templates
• SPARQL/SPIN templates
• XSLT stylesheets (both server- and client-side)
• RDF/POST encoding

Please join this group if you’re interested in any practical or theoretical aspects of RDF Knowledge Graphs, Linked Data, Semantic Web declarative technologies, or AtomGraph software.

In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2014-02-18 by Dziugas Tornau. The following people supported its creation: Dziugas Tornau, Martynas Jusevicius, Arto Bendiken, james anderson, Brad Jones. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of its activities.

The group now has access to W3C-hosted services for email, blog, wikis, irc, tracking tools, and more. Read more about tools and services available by default and upon request.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please send us email on site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team