Re: Why the collection?

> So what makes Hydra collections context-specific that doesn't make RDF lists context-specific?
> What aspects of the design worry you exactly?

Pages, for example. The way I see it, "Page" is an abstraction of
"Range". The latter is way more universal than the former, at least
IMHO. But that's not a problem, really. As long as I have my basic
building blocks to work with, everything else is a plus that does not
hurt. I would just move it to a dedicated project as think it's not as
basic and universal as the rest of Hydra.

> It's easier for people (and machines) to understand these things if they are expressed explicitly instead of relying on implicit assumptions or inferences.

Agreed.

> I see. So, you still want to give the collection itself a URL, right? In that case, the simplest JSON shape for the collection looks somewhat like this [...]

> Do you have something that you can share with us? I'm highly interested in what you came up with.

Well... Yes, unless I use the "describedBy" IANA rel in a Link header.
I'll do my best to come up with something for you to have a look at
over the next days but the gist of it is that I'm using "describedBy"
to point to a document that describes (in Hydra terms) a collection
(or the range of a collection) presented as a simple JSON array. A
(admittedly very dirty) nodejs proxy takes care of joining the
collection itself and its description into a single document that the
Hydra console can work with. I'm also using the "@reverse" trick and
the following:

ex:Range -->  ex:rangeOf --> ex:Collection
ex:Collection --> ex:hasRange --> ex:Range
ex:Collection --> ex:total --> int
ex:Range --> ex:start --> int
ex:Range --> ex:end --> int
ex:Collection --> ex:subject --> foaf:Person (or whatever)
ex:Collection --> ex:predicate --> foaf:knows (or whatever)

I might be using "describedBy" in the wrong way but the method itself
seems to work.

> P.S.: Text-only mails are generally preferred on mailing lists. Thanks :-)

Ops. Sorry about that. Will do better.

Received on Thursday, 12 March 2015 15:32:43 UTC