Re: Coherent (modern) definition of RWW

On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 10:22 AM Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@atomgraph.com>
wrote:

> When you remove collections from LDP, there's pretty much nothing left
> else than a graph store.
>
> https://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/wiki/Linked_Data_Platform_(LDP)_vs_SPARQL_Graph_Store_HTTP_Protocol_(GSP)
>
> I am convinced we need a formal definition of RWW, akin to SPARQL
> algebra, in order to ensure interoperability.
>

I'm not sure you can have a formal definition of such a loose concept,  you
could try to make a single RWW Protocol, being RESTy and using HTTP it'd
end up something like webdav, and if it required RDF or linked data then
it'd end up being something like LDP.

When you try to include too many technologies, specifications become
cumbersome to read, implement, and adhere to.

Perhaps there's some merit in exploring a loosely coupled modular protocol,
a base read-write that's a subset of http perhaps with a couple of headers
that allows updating the state of *any *media type, an extension that
exposes that state and a temporal element, an extension that handles auth*.
Maybe by requiring that it works *without *linked data, as well as with
linked data, that it's all media type agnostic, we can be truly
interoperable and pull together the intersection of work that the
membership here has been on for the last decade.

This may have all been done, my radar is a bit foggy these days.

There is also the distinct possibility that the write bit of rww just isn't
needed and already handled in a multitude of ways, that it's too
simplistic when often resources are an amalgamation of multiple different
resources in multiple differents states, automatically compiled deployed
from different places and different teams via layers of different building
and updating agents.

I'm thinking through my own use cases over the years, and think it's fair
to say that the only time I could use a RWW protocol would be to update
single data items/documents, which would probably be json documents, but
then it's immediately invalidated as 99% of the time any data I publish as
json, ld, or anything else, is just a transformation of data from a
different source, and is managed elsewhere often by somebody else or a
different process where there's no need for a transfer protocol in the
middle

Simply, I've not had to solve this write-web problem because it's not a
problem for me in any of my various work capacities over the years, even
though I do see it as a nice thing to have or do.

Interested to hear other people's thoughts here.