Salmon Protocol for automatic RDF store augmentation?

After seeing reference to it on the Social Web XG list, I've just been
reading about the cutely-named Salmon Protocol (summary at [1]) which
is primarily intended for use around syndication feeds, passing
downstream comments, ratings, and  annotations back to the originating
publisher.

Thinking out loud, it seems like there could be a handy use for it in
data sharing, in effect:

* store A broadcasts it has some information about resource R
* store B receives the announcement, discovers it has additional
information about R
* store B passes that information back to store A

Suppose we have a triplestore which publishes a recent-additions feed
(Atom with an RDF payload) as well as a Salmon Protocol endpoint.
These could presumably be implemented as thin wrappers around a
SPARQL/SPARQL Update endpoint.

We also have a subscriber to the recent-additions feed, which also has
a triplestore.

Now say the publisher passes along a triple, for example:

<http://example.org/fred#me> a foaf:Person .

The subscriber receives this and runs a query like:

CONSTRUCT { ?s ?p ?o }
WHERE { <http://example.org/fred#me> ?p ?o }

- and posts the results back to the original publisher, which adds
those triples to its store.

While I'm sure it would be possible to do this kind of thing more
directly using the semweb stack, use of the Salmon Protocol could
offer hooks into more traditional content-oriented Atom
datasources/sinks. (Noting that Atom can be mapped to RDF).

Does that make any sense?

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.salmon-protocol.org/salmon-protocol-summary

-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Friday, 29 January 2010 11:49:26 UTC