Re: Linked Data API

Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> Nathan wrote:
>> Leigh Dodds wrote:
>>  
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Yesterday, at the 2nd Linked Data London Meetup, Dave Reynolds, Jeni
>>> Tennison and myself ran a workshop introducing some work we've been
>>> doing around a "Linked Data API".
>>>
>>> The API is intended to be a middle-ware layer that can be deployed
>>> in-front of a SPARQL endpoint, providing the ability to create a
>>> RESTful data access layer for accessing the RDF data contained in the
>>> triple store. The middle-ware is configurable, and is intended to
>>> support a range of different access patterns and output formats. "Out
>>> of the box" the system provides delivery of the standard range of RDF
>>> serialisations, as well as simple JSON and XML serializations for
>>> descriptions of lists of resources. The API essentially maps
>>> parameterized URLs to underlying SPARQL queries, mediating the content
>>> negotiation of the results into a suitable format for the client.
>>>
>>> The current draft specification is at:
>>>
>>> http://purl.org/linked-data/api/spec
>>>     
>>
>> If I may make a suggestion; I'd like you to consider including the
>> formed SPARQL query in with the return; so that developers can get used
>> to the language and see how similar to existing SQL etc etc..
>>
>> For all this middle-ware is needed in the interim and provides access to
>> the masses, surely an extra chance to introduce developers to linked
>> data / rdf / sparql is a good thing?
>>   
> Of course!
> 
> ODBC / JDBC don't take SQL out of scope. Thus, the EAV graph model
> equivalent shouldn't take SPARQL out of scope.
> 
> Entity Framework doesn't take EntitySQL out of scope (this the less
> capable SPARQL equivalent in the ADO.NET realm).

Yup, I wasn't going to say anything, but may as well for what it's worth
(no disrespect meant, I totally sympathise with what you are all trying
to do being in the web service / api land myself for many years).

Here's what I see happening: Developers accessing the data through the
API, downloading it, parsing it in to an RDBMS using their own table /
class structure and then querying it locally with SQL. (And quite
possibly then turning it in to a CSV!)

I wish I had something useful to say here, after the above, but I don't
:( All I can say is that for those who SQL, SPARQL will take about a day
to get started with, as probably will the linked data api (after you
read the docs and get setup etc).

Many Regards,

Nathan

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2010 18:25:19 UTC