Good advice for the semantic web community

Ruben Verborgh has an piece on the how to move the semantic web forward.

[…] if you hosted a Web application, would you offer (even read-only) direct SQL access to your database? Of course you wouldn’t; this would pose a serious threat to the stability of your server. And, it’s not needed: you design your HTTP interface such that all data can be easily accessed—but you decide how!

We’ve been thinking of such HTTP interfaces that are handy to query Linked Data datasets. So the server still decides how clients access data—just like on the Web for humans or applications—but this time in RDF. We designed one such interface that consists of basic Linked Data Fragments, which offer triple-pattern-based access to a dataset. Servers can easily generate such fragments, and clients can use them to solve more complex queries themselves. So simple servers, smart clients.

Preach it, brother!