Re: "Basic profile" terminology ?

On 30 Jun 2012, at 01:07, <Erik.Wilde@emc.com> <Erik.Wilde@emc.com> wrote:

>> 
>> I do think that the most general service interaction description case is
>> too ambitious for this WG in the time scale, if nothing else because of
>> the lack of material to build on.  The list of WG deliverables covers
>> the building blocks which I read as a step on the journey, not the
>> journey itself.  Is that understanding correct?
> 
> we had quite a bit of scholastic discussions already. there are existing
> standards (http://dret.typepad.com/dretblog/atom-landscape.html) that
> cover a sizable number of topics listed in
> http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/charter#issues, and the interesting question is
> whether the charter prohibits us from considering solutions that are not
> based entirely on RDF, or not. mixing media types is business as usual in
> REST, but it may not be what everybody prefers. my current understanding
> is that you can interpret the charter both ways, and thus the question is
> not one of interpretation, but for the working group to decide which way
> it wants to go.

There is the GRDDL spec [1] ( which in my view should be updated with XSPARQL [2]  and something
similar for JSon like JSON GRDDL [3] ) which allows any format to be transformed into RDF.

The problem is that most formats that have not been thought with RDF in mind bring syntactic issues into play which I think makes UPDATE or PATCHes very difficult, since you can't just remove some relations and add new ones, you need to know how it is possible to do something like that for a particular syntax. It becomes then a question of hunting down RFCs, working out what is the latest, and a lot of different work that is really unnecessary. People end up spending a lot of time as on the Atom WG deciding how to write the syntax (where the attributes should go, in what order) in addition to the semantic work they have to do. Then one needs specialised parsers for each format....

But I can see it would be fine for example to allow people to POST an atom-entry in a collection if there was a clear GRDDL for the atom-entry xml format. Similarly if a server has a XSPARQL transformer for a particular mime type it could produce that if requested.

In short it is best to define the Protocol at a semantic level: you have collections that can be posted into, that can be linked, that take requests of documents about certain types of things... You can then reason about those logically. Then one has a few well known syntaxes ( Turtle perhaps ) and allow content negotiation to take care of the rest.

Henry


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/
[2] http://xsparql.deri.org/
[3] for which the spec no longer exists 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Saturday, 7 July 2012 16:34:42 UTC