ldp-ISSUE-33 (pagination): Pagination for non-container resources [Linked Data Platform core]

ldp-ISSUE-33 (pagination): Pagination for non-container resources [Linked Data Platform core]

http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/track/issues/33

Raised by: Richard Cyganiak
On product: Linked Data Platform core

Pagination is handy for containers, but actually equally necessary for any kind of resource.

Many resources in a graph have lots of in- or outlinks with the same property: a person's friends, an author's publications, a company's employees, a class's members, a geographical area's contained entities, and so on.

If a node has many arcs, the representation can become way too large, so that GET and PUT become impractical.

The solution would be to split these properties out into a separate document, and enable paging over that document. The paging mechanism currently defined for containers seems to be perfectly adequate for this, except that the problem described is independent from the question whether the resource and its arcs have some sort of container/composition semantics.

Like in containers, it is useful for a client to know the ordering in which the paging happens, or even to be able to affect the ordering.

Related stuff:

* TimBL's seminal “Linked Data” post already has hints of this problem in the section on “Limitations on browseable data”: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
* A D2RQ issue for implementing this: https://github.com/d2rq/d2rq/issues/126

Received on Monday, 5 November 2012 20:51:06 UTC