In talking to people about modelling metadata I’ve picked up on a distinction mentioned by Staurt Sutton between entity-based modelling, typified by RDF and graphs, and record-based structures typified by XML; however, I don’t think making this distinction alone is sufficient to explain the difference, let alone why it matters.  I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of either approach here, just give a couple of examples of where something that works in a monolithic, hierarchical record falls apart when the properties and relationships for each entity are described separately and those descriptions put into a graph. These are especially relevant when people familiar with XML or JSON start using JSON-LD. One of the great things about JSON-LD is that you can use instance data as if it were JSON, without really paying much regard to the “LD” part; that’s not true when designing specs because design choices that would be fine in a JSON record will not work in a linked data graph. Continue reading →