I was just getting ready to enter more whimsical videos into my tracker when I saw Norm Walsh's pointer to James Clark's new blog. Clark's awesome first entry: Do we need a new kind of schema language? was worth the time I spent on it.

Here are a few things that I've got on my mind now:

- JSON Schemas

- Microsoft LINQ:

.NET Language Integrated Query adds query capabilities to the CLR and languages that target it. The query facility builds on lambda expressions and expression trees to allow predicates, projections, and key extraction expressions to be used as opaque executable code or as transparent in-memory data suitable for downstream processing or translation.

Source: LINQ Project Overview

- Scala

- TEDI:

TEDI would be defined in terms of a generic data model that makes a tasteful restricted choice from these programming languages' data structures: not limiting the choice to the lowest common denominator, but leaving our frills and focusing on the basics and on things that be naturally mapped into each language. At least initially, I think I would restrict TEDI to trees rather than handle general graphs. Although graphs are important, I think the success of JSON shows that trees are good enough as a programmer-friendly data interchange mechanism.
...
There's one other big piece that's needed to make TEDI work: annotations. Each component of a TEDI schema can have multiple, independent annotations, which may be inline or externally attached in some way. Each annotation has a prefix that identifies a binding. A TEDI binding specification has to be developed for each programming language and each serialization that will be used with TEDI.

Source: Do we need a new kind of schema language?

His description of TEDI reminds me that the semweb community has a huge challenge on our hands: how to make graph data - whether locally or across the web - easier to comprehend and to use.