Re: RDF Update Feeds + URI time travel on HTTP-level

Good man, I couldn't help thinking there was a paper in that...

2009/11/22 Herbert Van de Sompel <hvdsomp@gmail.com>:
> hi all,
> (thanks Chris, Richard, Danny)
>
> In light of the current discussion, I would like to provide some
> clarifications regarding "Memento: Time Travel for the Web", ie the idea of
> introducing HTTP content negotiation in the datetime dimension:
> (*) Some extra pointers:
> - For those who prefer browsing slides over reading a paper, there is
> http://www.slideshare.net/hvdsomp/memento-time-travel-for-the-web
> - Around mid next week, a video recording of a presentation I gave on
> Memento should be available at http://www.oclc.org/research/dss/default.htm
> - The Memento site is at http://www.mementoweb.org. Of special interest may
> be the proposed HTTP interactions for (a) web servers with internal archival
> capabilities such as content management systems, version control systems,
> etc (http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/http/local/) and (b) web servers
> without internal archival capabilities
> (http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/http/remote/).
> (*) The overall motivation for the work is the integration of archived
> resources into regular web navigation by making them available via their
> original URIs. The archived resources we have focused on in our experiments
> so far are those kept by
> (a) Web Archives such as the Internet Archive, Webcite, archive-it.org and
> (b) Content Management Systems such as wikis, CVS, ...
> The reason I pinged Chris Bizer about our work is that we thought that our
> proposed approach could also be of interest in the LoD environment.
>  Specifically, the ability to get to prior descriptions of LoD resources by
> doing datetime content negotiation on their URI seemed appealing; e.g. what
> was the dbpedia description for the City of Paris on March 20 2008? This
> ability would, for example, allow analysis of (the evolution of ) data over
> time. The requirement that is currently being discussed in this thread
> (which I interpret to be about approaches to selectively get updates for a
> certain LoD database) is not one I had considered using Memento for,
> thinking this was more in the realm of feed technologies such as Atom (as
> suggested by Ed Summers), or the pre-REST OAI-PMH
> (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html).
> (*) Regarding some issues that were brought up in the discussion so far:
> - We use an X header because that seems to be best practice when doing
> experimental work. We would very much like to eventually migrate to a real
> header, e.g. Accept-Datetime.
> - We are definitely considering and interested in some way to formalize our
> proposal in a specification document. We felt that the I-D/RFC path would
> have been the appropriate one, but are obviously open to other approaches.
> - As suggested by Richard, there is a bootstrapping problem, as there is
> with many new paradigms that are introduced. I trust LoD developers fully
> understand this problem. Actually, the problem is not only at the browser
> level but also at the server level. We are currently working on a FireFox
> plug-in that, when ready, will be available through the regular channels.
> And we have successfully (and experimentally) modified the Mozilla code
> itself to be able to demonstrate the approach. We are very interested in
> getting support in other browsers, natively or via plug-ins. We also have
> some tools available to help with initial deployment
> (http://www.mementoweb.org/tools/ ). One is a plug-in for the mediawiki
> platform; when installed the wiki natively supports datetime content
> negotiation and redirects a client to the history page that was active at
> the datetime requested in the X-Accept-Header. We just started a Google
> group for developers interested in making Memento happen for their web
> servers, content management system, etc.
> (http://groups.google.com/group/memento-dev/).
> (*) Note that the proposed solution also leverages the OAI-ORE specification
> (fully compliant with LoD best practice) as a mechanism to support discovery
> of archived resources.
> I hope this helps to get a better understanding of what Memento is about,
> and what its current status is. Let me end by stating that we would very
> much like to get these ideas broadly adopted. And we understand we will need
> a lot of help to make that happen.
> Cheers
> Herbert
> ==
> Herbert Van de Sompel
> Digital Library Research & Prototyping
> Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library
> http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
> tel. +1 505 667 1267
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Wednesday, 25 November 2009 06:31:10 UTC