Re: Review of Use-Case Document

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Harry Halpin wrote:

>    I'm a bit less comfortable trying to provide more motivating padding
> for the XForms Atom example, because I've never made an XForms app,
> although I have used them and they're very cool. So, I'm a bit confused
> - it seems like what the use-case is that Voltaire (great name!) is
> using this XForms/Atom combo to automatically update their blog with the
> content of publishers with similar interest. So, let's say Voltaire has
> a blog about bird-watching. However, he's busy watching birds and
> doesn't have time to surf the net and find feeds of his friends as he
> looks for kites, a type of bird. The professional ornithologist Johan
> Bos, who recently spotted a red kite (Milvus milvus) far from their
> breeding ground in central Wales, and who recently posted a blog entry
> about it. However, (is this what RDF Forms in combo with the
> Intropsection document do - I'm not really seeing how this is
> possible...)

RDF Forms is pretty light weight in that it only describes service URL's, 
the HTTP methods they accept, and the mime-type of the content they 
expect.  So, the RDF Forms extracted from the XForms (for 'manually' 
adding entries to his blog) will contain service URL's 
against which a piece of software can sniff to find endpoints specifically 
for atom (I forget the Atom mime-type).

The Introspection Document [1] bit should probably be left out and was 
mostly my attempt to read into how the Atom Publishing protocol could be use to 
discover locations from which Atom can be retrieved and submitted to.

Since the XForms would POST atom entries (composed at a users browser) 
directly to a URL with the appropriate mime-type, this isn't neccessary.

> when Johan updates his web-log about the red kite, it
> automatically gets posted to Voltaire's blog. Is this correct?

No, this isn't what i had in mind and this probably should be clarified in 
the use-case.  What I was thinking was something of the social dynamic of 
Planet aggregation blogs (Planet XML, Planet RDF) but with a reversed 
subscription model.

Let's say Voltaire's blog is pretty popular and encompasses many major areas of interest (one 
of which is bird watching).  Rather than 'manually' subscribing to 
third-party blogs that are appropriate to the themes he covers, he can 
reverse the subscription model to be push-based (i.e., people who want 
thier blogs to be included can push the appropriate entries to his blog).

> Hmmm...why shouldn't Voltaire just subscribe to Johan's blog feed, using
> just normal XML? Is it the posting operation? A bit confused.

So, to follow your example.  Voltaire wouldn't need to manage the 
subscriptions all he might want to do is perhaps grant accounts for Johan for HTTP-level 
authentication (as a deterent for spam - as you can imagine, reversing the 
subscription model in this way opens up Voltaires system for lots of 
spam).

So his blog becomes somewhat of a magnet for similar entries of interest

Then Johan can either post his entries to Voltaires blog manually 
(through the XForms) or have a program periodically extract the service 
URLs (via GRDDL), transform the content at these URLs to Atom/OWL and 
query the resulting RDF to determine if the topics match.  If so, 
replicate his entries at the matching URLs by POSTing them there.

Though it might *sound* rather involved, I think the reality is that the 
two GRDDL profiles in this scenario do most of the legwork.  The remaining 
bit is querying over the resulting RDF and the queries in each case are 
very simple (I could quickly write them up in SPARQL).

>    As for the guitar use-case, I'll leave this in Brian Suda's hands -
> but it would be *great* if we had a real-live microformat hReview
> database to make this work, instead of having to imagine one. And then,
> as Danny Ayers said, we have to "pretend" they authorized the use of
> GRDDL on their data.

As for the Clinical Data usecase, the RDF primarily buys him (over XQuery) 
an additional level of interpretation (that is as useful an ontology 
associated with the RDF is well organized) that a structured format 
doesn't give you.

And yes, the added complication of *multiple* XML vocabularies makes the 
mapping to a unified ontology much more valuable.  The HL3RIM Ontology I 
was refering to is here [2].

[1] http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-09.html#find-collections
[2] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLS/ACPPTaskForce?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=RIMV3OWL.zip


Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org

Received on Thursday, 24 August 2006 20:06:35 UTC