Re: Use case: Common access

I like the gist of this use case. A possible variant could
also address distributed/federated query, where the query
broker simply maintains a set of URIs denoting DAWG compliant
portals, and addition of new sources is done simply by adding
to that set of URIs.

Patrick

On Mar 29, 2004, at 19:32, ext Seaborne, Andy wrote:

>
>
>
> == Task
>
> A support engineer wants to find the telephone number of a person 
> called
> "Fred Bloggs", a person he has not spoken to before but one of his 
> workgroup
> colleagues has.  The information may be one of several databases
> (information may be quite new, a workgroup may have different 
> databases for
> different support situations for historical reasons).
>
> The support engineer has a phone number look facility on his PDA.  This
> software knows the query needed based on FOAF but needs to be told 
> where to
> ask the query.
>
> == Importance of DAWG
>
> In order to ask the same query of different databases, the software 
> tool
> needs to know what protocol to use.  The DAWG recommendation provides a
> common way of doing this so the software tool does not need to do 
> anything
> different except change the destination of the query.
>
> End-users benefit in seamless access to a wider variety of data 
> sources.
> Application providers benefit from wider access to different kinds of 
> data
> sources without needing to provide specific software; similarly for 
> server
> software providers.
>
> == Other
>
> This is a common access protocol use case.  By having one common 
> protocol,
> the same client-side software can be used with different datasources 
> even if
> the software was written independently of the database interface.  It 
> does
> not matter which implementation of a web-based interface is used.
>
> The protocol should use already deployed technology (SOAP and/or HTTP) 
> to
> reduce the deployment burden.  The DAWG rec. need only describe how to
> package the query and the details of the result.
>
> The ability to execute queries from a small device suggests a 
> lightweight
> usage of HTTP or SOAP, or at least a lightweight subset.
>
> It is possible that the DAWG-QL will not cover all possible 
> situations.  The
> protocol could be used to carry other queries, in specialised query
> languages, in the same general framework.
>
>

--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2004 03:59:24 UTC