1. Why I should publish Linked Data. The “why” means I want to understand the value returned by the investment of time required, and by this I mean compelling, possibly visual and certainly useful examples

Two benefits, one is that I “standard developer” can along and query your entire site as if it had an api – “select all posts with a comment made by me” and use that data – the second benefit is that you can do this too, saving you lots of coding and negating your application all together, simply query and render the results. (hence why i mentioned dropping 2500 classes down to 30 earlier). Linked data removes the need for 80% of code imho; and all code you do make is truly re-usable (with the exceptions of specific queries and presentation templates).

2. How I should do this, and easily. If you need to use the word “ontology” or “triple” or make me understand the deepest horrors of RDF, consider your approach a failed approach

consider what I’d say a failed approach then; the ontology and the triple are as needed as the sql, the pojo, the class, the struct, array and the variable. The ontology and the triple are where the power sits, remove them from your equation and you’re simply going through a pointless confusing exercise which you’ll reap no benefits from (although others will as they can consume your data and treat your entire site as an api).

3. Some compelling use-cases which demonstrate that this is better than a simple API/feed based approach.

Ack, the use-case is everything – you need to grok that first – if ten sites publish linked data, then I can query those ten sites in a single query as if all the data where local, and in a single table, in a format I already understand. Or in API terms, I can call ten remote apis in a single call and correlate filter and query the results, all in one line of “query” – show me another way of doing that and I’ll eat my hat. Swap out the ten with one million and its still possible. I’d say show me a compelling use case not to adopt that level of functionality and MRD-ness.

regards !