Aaron Hillel Swartz

“ APIs are nice and all, but they’re fairly limiting: they only give you the answers to questions you already know how to ask. Want to find out more about book 3j7is? Sure, it’ll tell you. But want to know which books published recently share an author with a book published over a hundred years ago? That’s a little more complicated.
But, luckily, not impossible. It seems ridiculous to come up with your own API that could answer any sort of question like this. But remember those RDF query languages we were making fun of in the last chapter? ”

“ In the meantime, we can at least help those who can help themselves to our data, by providing bulk dumps. The theory here is simple: there are lots of queries and merges and visualizations people will want to do with your data that are going to be impractical to do through any sort of API, even one as fancy as SPARQL. So you might as well just give them a full copy of the data set. ”