Re: Restpark - Minimal RESTful API for querying RDF triples

On 4/16/13 1:52 PM, Luca Matteis wrote:
> I have recently created Restpark: http://lmatteis.github.io/restpark/
>
> It's my way of pushing a standard RESTful interface for accessing RDF 
> data. Still in its very infancy but hopefully it can be something to 
> consider. I personally think the Semantic Web community desperately 
> needs a simpler protocol for querying RDF, along side SPARQL. I have 
> nothing against SPARQL, it's an important standard to have. But 
> something simpler and RESTful needs to be part of the Semantic Web stack.
>
> The entire web community is used to consuming APIs as simple HTTP 
> requests (REST). Would you imagine GitHub, Flickr, or any other 
> web-service API actually exposing SQL instead of their RESTful API? It 
> would make things a bit more complicated for third-parties in my 
> opinion, but more importantly it would make things so much more 
> complicated for services to implement.
>
> I would love to think what the community thinks about this.
>
> Best,
> Luca
Fine, but it's really important that you understand the fundamental 
difference between SPARQL and (a) RESTFul API.

SPARQL (via SPARQL-Protocol) offers a declarative query language that 
extends HTTP.  Thus, it incorporates RESTful interaction and more.

There is not such thing as one RESTFul API that will be accepted by all. 
And even if such a thing miraculously manifests, it will be unable to 
handle the different data access and interactions dimensions that are 
the basis for declarative query languages. Thus, you will always end up 
with an ever increasing number of divergent APIs that simply won't scale.

In the SQL RDBMS world you have the likes of ODBC, JDBC etc.. Even as 
vast as these APIs are re. RDBMS abstraction, you still don't have 
anything what would match the ability to execute SQL uniformly over HTTP 
against any RDBMS.  I have nothing against REST, but I think we do need 
to put it into appropriate perspective.

SPARQL scales while RESTful APIs don't or won't, for the reasons I've 
outlined above. Of course, RESFTful APIs are good mechanisms for 
accelerating SPARQL appreciation :-)

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen