RE: Why the collection?

On 6 Mrz 2015 at 19:48, Tomasz Pluskiewicz wrote:
> On 2015-03-06 12:32, Jacopo Scazzosi wrote:
>> Also, if the goal is to "describe Web APIs" from a practical,
>> what-can-you-do-with-this point of view, then wouldn't Hydra benefit
>> from the separation of concerns obtained by delegating the semantics of
>> collections to dedicated vocabs?
> 
> These is exactly what I have been trying to say some time last month. I
> think that we are going into specific design of a collection. My point
> was similar, that any kind of collection (or partial view) could be
> modeled with simple building blocks like Operations and Links.

That's what we are trying to do, aren't we? We try to define a couple of link relation types (= properties). What alternative design do you have in mind? Could you please sketch it with a simple example?


> Any specialized terms sometimes seem a little out of place in a
> general-purpose hypermedia vocabulary I think Hydra is.

IMO, collections are the most basic data structure that is used in almost every Web API. Unfortunately, RDF (the data model) doesn't handle them very well natively so we need a construct to address those shortcomings in Hydra.


>> I'm absolutely no expert but collections seem to be so context-specific
>> that even you guys are experiencing some difficulties in finding a common
>> ground - hence my considerations.

What is context-specific about them? Would you argue that lists (think rdf:List) are context-specific as well?


> On the other hand non-linked hypermedia approaches all sport some notion
> of a collection, though I would very much draw any conclusion from that
> simple fact.

That's the thing, you need such a concept to realize even the simplest APIs. I think it would be a huge mistake to leave the design of such a building block as "an exercise for the reader".


Cheers,
Markus


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Monday, 9 March 2015 22:18:48 UTC