Getting started with Hydra

Hi There,

Markus Lanthaler suggested via Twitter that I should take a look at Hydra for a
project I'm working on right now and I'd like to know how/where to get started
with Hydra and what the benefits are of using it.

What i'm doing is part of the PiLOD initiative [1], whose goal it is to promote
the use of LOD in the Netherlands.

I'm working on one of the cases where we want to investigate best practices to
use linked data in web applications and make the life of app developers easier.
In particular we want to look at how JSON-LD can be applied and Hydra seems to
also be very relevant.

The first thing we are looking at is how to provide a web service for vehicle
registration data. The current web service is available as OData [2] and we want
to basically map this to JSON-LD and provide an RDF vocabulary to define all the
properties, etc. I'm currently working on the vocabulary and trying out writing
it directly in JSON-LD just for the giggles [3].

The initial version of the web service will be pretty simple and basically allow
an agent to GET a description of a registered vehicle. The URI template will be
something like:
http://example.com/kentekenapi/{registration}

The primary use case is that a user agent knows the registration of a vehicle
and wants to look up more info about it.

Alongside this we might also provide paginated lists of registered vehicles,
possibly with the option to filter the results by passing parameters in the
request e.g. get the list of all red cars with manufacturer Ferrari.

Any help/advice is much appreciated.

[1] http://www.pilod.nl (in Dutch)
[2] http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/opendata.rdw/vrtg.open.data
[3] https://gist.github.com/jaw111/9538081

Regards,

John Walker
Principal Consultant & co-founder
Semaku B.V.
SFJ 4.009, Torenallee 20, 5617 BC Eindhoven
Mobile: +31 6 475 22030
Email: john.walker@semaku.com
Skype: jaw111

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