Uniform, Core RDF Update Protocol for HTTP (FPWD)

I've committed an initial draft for the "RESTful RDF update" document.  I
tried to be as faithful to the intent and language of the AWWW, HTTP/URI
RFCs, REST literature as possible.

http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/docs/http-rdf-update/

In order to ensure a meaningful mapping to HTTP, I had to describe a
protocol model and introduce some terminology to clarify the model and the
roles of the actors to (hopefully) help with the discussion at least with
respect to the open issue of using ?graph=.. to (indirectly) route HTTP
operations to a network-manipulable RDF graph.

The outstanding questions that need to be answered to reconcile the protocol
model to this use case are:

- What do those 'proxy' URIs identify?
- If they identify an addressable data-processing service, does that break
cacheability, and URI best practices around consistent identification of
resources? 

My current intuition is that if we consider:

http://example.com/graph1?graph=http://inaccessible.domain.org/graph1

to be a separate URI that identifies the same networked RDF knowledge as
does

http://inaccessible.domain.org/graph1

Then this works with the protocol model described so far.

There seems to be some similarity between the behavior we want from routing
HTTP operations to the proxy URI and the semantics of the use of 303 for
indirection, but I didn't pursue that thought any further.

Currently, the protocol model assumes the methods are only directed at
'information resources' that are identified by the (resolvable) IRIs of
named graphs in a dataset managed by an implementation of this protocol (I
use the term networked RDF knowledge as a special kind of 'information
resource' in this model).

I'm hoping the terminology helps to keep the dialog out of the philosophical
quick sand often associated with the URI resolution / denotation redux
thread.  

Comments are welcome

----------------------
Chime (chee-meh) Ogbuji (oh-bu-gee)
Heart and Vascular Institute (Clinical Investigations)
Architect / Informatician
Cleveland Clinic (ogbujic@ccf.org)
Ph.D. Student Case Western Reserve University
(chimezie.thomas-ogbuji@case.edu)


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Received on Monday, 28 September 2009 22:45:39 UTC