Re: Publications on SOA and linked data?

On 24 Aug 2009, at 13:31, Axel Rauschmayer wrote:
> Web services and linked data seem highly related: Many of the linked  
> data introductions feel ReSTful, as does Tabulator's use of SPARQL/ 
> update. But, while there are many blog posts out there that briefly  
> touch on this topic, I have yet to find a publication that paints a  
> complete and coherent picture. Is anyone aware of such publications  
> (or currently writing one ;-) ?
>
> There are semantic web services, but I would expect linked data web  
> services to be different.

Typical linked data deployments can be seen as read-only web services  
that embrace the REST style (as opposed to RPC/SOAP-style services),  
and deliver RDF, and use separate URIs to identify publication units  
(documents) and domain entities.

Every linked data deployment is a web service, in the same sense that  
every website is a web service that delivers HTML.

As such, linked data can certainly be used to implement SOA *in  
certain cases*. I think it should work well when the ultimate goal is  
around search and data warehousing, and it's probably not a good fit  
if it's mostly about transactional data. I think linked data is  
particularly well suited to situations where the number and the  
details, schema etc., of the individual services is not known in  
advance.

There's quite some mismatch in terminology though, because in SOA  
there's a focus on the messages that are exchanged between services,  
while in linked data there's a focus on the data that's held in the  
services. SOA is about integrating systems by decomposing them into  
services; linked data is about integrating systems into a unified  
information space.

I'm not aware of a publication that provides a nice overview of these  
issues.

Semantic Web Services are something else altogether.

Best,
Richard


>
> Greetings,
>
> Axel
>
> -- 
> Axel Rauschmayer
>
> axel@rauschma.de
> http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/people/staff/rauschmayer/axel-rauschmayer/
> http://2ality.blogspot.com/
> http://hypergraphs.de/
>
>

Received on Monday, 24 August 2009 14:02:18 UTC