Re: Atom for RDF transfer?

On 9 Jul 2005, at 11:18, Danny Ayers wrote:

> There's also URIQA, which can provide the operations listed, but is
> more aligned towards working with authoritative sources, i.e. where
> the host "owns" the resources identified. Technically it looks good,
> but involves the addition of extra HTTP methods, which has caused some
> controversy.

"can" doesn't quite cover it[9]. For those who aren't familiar with  
URIQA:

---
In addition to the methods described above, the URIQA model also  
defines a simple semantic web service interface providing for access  
to descriptions of resources by third parties other than the web  
authority of the URI denoting the resource and/or for resources  
denoted by URIs which are not meaningful to the HTTP protocol.

All URIQA service implementations must provide support for the  
following parameters:

Method       Parameter    Value

GET, POST    uri          <URI>
    The URL encoded URI denoting the resource described.

POST         method       MGET, MPUT, or MDELETE
    The URIQA method to be applied.

Input resource descriptions should be provided to POST requests as  
the request body, as appropriate.
---

e.g.

---
POST /uriqa?uri=uuid%3a438c44e9%2d6b2f%2d11d7%2d944a% 
2d006097b1ebc&method=MDELETE HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

    Remove statements from the description maintained by example.com  
of the resource denoted by <uuid:438c44e9-6b2f-11d7-944a-006097b1ebc>  
(optional description provided as request body).
---

Certainly it is aligned to working with whole descriptions (a strict  
implementation needs N operations for N resources identified by URIs,  
ignoring body statements that aren't in the CBD of the resource) and  
the additional verbs make working with authoritative descriptions  
easier, but URIQA is more versatile than it is given credit for.

> So how might all this be done in Atom? I don't really know, beyond
> thinking perhaps that many of the interfacing operations with a
> triplestore may be exressed nicely as a sequence of entries, content
> as graphs, each entry representing an add/delete operation.

It's late, so I might be wrong, but I think that's an interesting and  
potentially fruitful line of inquiry...

-R

> [9] http://sw.nokia.com/uriqa/URIQA.html

Received on Sunday, 10 July 2005 22:22:32 UTC