Re: with WSDL Re: Web services returning RDF?

Hi

> The SKOS Web Service (demo at http://thes.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/demos/get and
> links to source etc) doesn't seem to actuallly return RDF, but it is
> runnng over an RDF system so presumably this is a matter of tweaking the
> source a bit.
>
The SKOS Web Service returns XML constrained by the SOAP (1.2) encoding 
schema (http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part2/#soapenc). Two points that may be 
relevant to this:

i) If you are interested in consuming generic SOAP encoded data (i.e. from 
some web service configured as RPC/Encoded as opposed to Document/Literal) 
then you can transform your data to RDF on the client side as exampled in 
earlier (to the SKOS web service) SWAD-E work documented at 
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/sw_soap_design_report/
Max Froumentin and I developed two XSLT files for this purpose:

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/sw_soap_design_report/soap_1_1_to_
1_2.xsl
and

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/sw_soap_design_report/soap_to_rdf.
xsl

Note that we were constrained by the immaturity of the SOAP software  we 
were using at the time (with respect to the SOAP standards) and hence the 
prior transformation of SOAP from 1.1 to 1.2 was required. Due to the fact 
that the SOAP encoding data model bears similarity to the RDF data model, 
this was an interesting study w.r.t. web services.

ii) The RPC/Encoded versus Document/Literal debate was something of a 
minefield at the time we were developing the SKOS Web Service. Tool support 
then was significantly stronger for RPC/Encoded than Document/Literal. We 
have documented the fact that Industry has since swung in favour of 
Document/Literal - and advise that Document/Literal is a good direction for 
the SKOS Web Service. Possibly a SOAP response format that is RDF/XML and 
constrained both by an XML schema and an RDF schema would be an interesting 
approach for maximised interoperability?

Nikki






> cheers
>
> Chaals
>
> On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Ian Dickinson wrote:
>
>> I have a follow-up question to Bob's: is anyone using WSDL to describe
>> their RDF-returning web services?  I'm adding wsdl awareness to a tool
>> I'm working on, and it would be neat to be able to test it on real
>> service descriptions that I didn't create.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Ian
>>
>>
>
> Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409
> 134 136 SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe         fax(france): +33
> 4 92 38 78 22  Post:   21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
> or
>  W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
>



----------------------
NJ Rogers, Technical Researcher
(Semantic Web Applications Developer)
Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT)
Email:nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk
Tel: +44(0)117 9287096 (Direct)
Tel: +44(0)117 9287193 (Office)

Received on Thursday, 14 October 2004 09:18:02 UTC