Re: hydra:returns for operations returning collections of class instances

On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 11:47 PM, Markus Lanthaler
<markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> wrote:
>> Wouldn't this design lead to proliferation of "collection classes" for
>> many popular classes? I can imagine that if this was recommended
>> practice, then we could see several classes of collections of
>> schema:Person or schema:Product etc.
>
> I don't think so because those classes don't need to have a name (or identifier if you prefer). As you see above, you would just

If you used blank nodes for the collection classes, then you'd likely
have to duplicate the class description. For example, the same
collection class can be described in hydra:Operation's hydra:returns
and in the representation of collection instance (as rdf:type).


>> The description is in OWL (albeit in a simple subset) and there might
>> be few clients and developers, who create these clients, that read
>> OWL. If the main goal is to support a machine-readable API
>> description, which is also readable to most web developers, and
>> reasoning support isn't required, then OWL might not be the best way
>> how to achieve this goal.
>
> Fully agreed. If this feature turns out to be important, we can introduce a shortcut or something directly into Hydra.

It would be great to have more input on the mailing list from people
building Hydra clients. So far, it seems that most of the people on
this list are instead building Hydra servers. This might be a yet
another "chicken or the egg" problem...


>> This design doesn't help solving the ISSUE #41 (a.k.a. collections
>> breaking relationships), which I think is very much related, so a
>> solution to this issue should be aligned with the solution to ISSUE #41.
>
> I think it's a mostly unrelated issue.

I think the issues are at least a bit related because they both
discuss how to "look inside of hydra:Collection" to discover the types
of the collection members.

- Jindřich

-- 
Jindřich Mynarz
http://mynarz.net/#jindrich

Received on Thursday, 19 June 2014 10:21:19 UTC