CURIE Syntax 1.0
We deserve nice things.
I hadn't heard of this before.
It looks like CURIE was mainly used as part of the push towards the semantic web- the spec says as much, and some web research confirms it.
I'm guessing its biggest challenge is that I don't see any simple way to differentiate between a CURIE URI and a normal URI? They even touch on this in the spec of how the two are hard to differentiate.
I was one of those people who really believed in the Semantic Web for a time. My earliest semantic web activity is that I'd taken a TTRPG character sheet and transformed it into a set of semantic values which then expanded into a full character sheet using XSLT. I was also into FoaF and microformats, and I was genuinely excited by Wikidata.
Ultimately though, I think that the pragmatic side largely won out. Many of these formats focused on expression over function, meaning that they were neat but the focus was on asking people to express data in machine readable formats over building software that used it. It was fun to build your own FoaF parser and engine, but without software to use it, it was of limited value. Worse, when you did try to use it (as I did), you quickly found that the openness was too much. I wanted lo give my phone number out only to people I trusted, but I never figured out a way to do that with FoaF- for example. Similarly the other semantic web protocols felt "dreamed up" rather than engineered because they lacked a large implementation, or even a reference implementation other than the format itself.
This is why I think JSON-LD won out- it could express the same semantics as RDF and friends, but it didn't demand it of a parser. An implementer could treat the format just like any other JSON for the purpose of their application.
That brings us back to CURIE. There's a reference to CURIE in JSON-LD as "compact syntax" but I think that is a part of why it didn't last- in JSON-LD you can just specify a @context and then you don't need to worry about it, so using a compact form is of no practical benefit.
Unless there's something I'm missing?
I hadn't heard of this before. It looks like CURIE was mainly used as part of the push towards the semantic web- the spec says as much, and some web research confirms it. I'm guessing its biggest cha…
This is very fair commentary and I agree with most of it. Especially the bits about the failure of the semantic web. I would say that projects like identifiers.org and semantic.farm do show the use case for CURIEs as compact identifiers used for large datasets like in research. You made a really good point about @context in JSON-LD, however.