Use case: Common access

== Task

A support engineer wants to find the telephone number of a person called
"Fred Bloggs", a person he has not spoken to before but one of his workgroup
colleagues has.  The information may be one of several databases
(information may be quite new, a workgroup may have different databases for
different support situations for historical reasons).

The support engineer has a phone number look facility on his PDA.  This
software knows the query needed based on FOAF but needs to be told where to
ask the query.

== Importance of DAWG

In order to ask the same query of different databases, the software tool
needs to know what protocol to use.  The DAWG recommendation provides a
common way of doing this so the software tool does not need to do anything
different except change the destination of the query.

End-users benefit in seamless access to a wider variety of data sources.
Application providers benefit from wider access to different kinds of data
sources without needing to provide specific software; similarly for server
software providers.

== Other

This is a common access protocol use case.  By having one common protocol,
the same client-side software can be used with different datasources even if
the software was written independently of the database interface.  It does
not matter which implementation of a web-based interface is used.

The protocol should use already deployed technology (SOAP and/or HTTP) to
reduce the deployment burden.  The DAWG rec. need only describe how to
package the query and the details of the result.

The ability to execute queries from a small device suggests a lightweight
usage of HTTP or SOAP, or at least a lightweight subset.

It is possible that the DAWG-QL will not cover all possible situations.  The
protocol could be used to carry other queries, in specialised query
languages, in the same general framework.

Received on Monday, 29 March 2004 11:35:18 UTC