Re: LDP would benefit from being RESTful

On Fri, 2012-11-16 at 19:57 +0100, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> On Wednesday 14. November 2012 13.58.33 David Booth wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-11-14 at 10:28 -0800, Erik Wilde wrote:
> > > [ . . .  ] RDF isn't 
> > > RESTful it itself because it's not a hypermedia format. 
> > 
> > Huh?  I'm baffled by that comment.  Why do you say RDF is not a
> > hypermedia format?   For one thing, RDF is composed almost entirely of
> > URIs, i.e., links.  How much more link-ful can you get?  
> 
> Erik is partially right: By itself, RDF is a hypermedia format only on a 
> very, very superficial level. 
> 
> I'd like to encourage everybody to do the exercise to go Mike Amundsen's 
> hypermedia classification: http://amundsen.com/hypermedia/hfactor/
> You will quickly realize that RDF, out of the box, is a hypermedia only on 
> the LO level.

Ah-ha!  Now I see what Erik meant.  Just to be clear on terminology,
AFAIK Amundsen's requirements go *far* beyond the conventional
definition of "hypermedia"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermedia
as Amundsen's requirements are all about supporting hypermedia
*applications*, which of course is what we want to do with LDP and
Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS .
Mike's H Factor summary is excellent!

> 
> However, as I show in my ESWC LAPIS2012 presentation, see
> http://folk.uio.no/kjekje/2012/lapis2012.xhtml
> RDF can be made to be a very powerful hypermedia type by fairly trivial 
> means. In fact, it can easily meet all but one of Amundsen's criteria (I 
> just realised that LE can be met using data URIs).
> 
> I've been talking with people F2F on ISWC about this, and I hope I have 
> convinced some that this is the direction one should be going. And I really 
> don't think this is out of the scope of the charter, to the contrary, if 
> this is done right, it is what the charter really means. :-)

Very nice!  It looks like an excellent direction to me!  



-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

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Received on Friday, 16 November 2012 21:13:41 UTC