PS-17: Opacity of Content Management Infrastructure

A knowledge provider maintains descriptions about a large number
of resources, and manages those descriptions in a distributed
manner, such that the sum total knowledge known about a given
resource may be expressed and managed in several distinct
documents, which may be independently retrieved by GET.

A client submits a query/request for a description of a resource
from the knowledge provider, and in response is provided a
complete description of that resource which in no way reflects
the internal, distributed, fragmented content management
infrastructure employed by the knowledge provider.

--

I.e. clients shouldn't have to know about specific RDF/XML instances,
models, databases, stores, records, or how they are organized,
partitioned, or where located, etc. in order to submit a query of
any kind per the DAWG recommendation.

Queries should be completely agnostic to all aspects of storage
and management of the knowledge in question.

If a knowledge provider wishes to provide explicit access to
a specific body of knowledge as expressed in a specific, single
RDF/XML instance, fine, but that is an implementational detail
of which the client should remain totally ignorant insofar as
the machinery specified by the DAWG recommendation is concerned.

--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Friday, 19 March 2004 02:52:54 UTC