- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 20:23:56 -0500 (EST)
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
On Sun, 14 Nov 1999, Will Sargent wrote: > I have a problem I'm hoping someone help me with. This may not be the right > forum; if so, I apologize in advance. No worries - You've found the right forum! > I've been working on integrating bookmarks in Mozilla with a remote > database, so that users can have collaborative bookmarking. I was > originally thinking of using serialized RDF as the protocol, but > AFAIK, serialized RDF doesn't provide facilities for removing or > modifying data -- there's no API for it. Right. The specs only give us data structures right now... > There are two strategies I can think of... one of them is to have little > bundles of RDF I can use as commands, and have the server send back RDF > acks... Seems a reasonable approach to me. And consistent with the discussion we were having here earlier in the week concerning updates to aggregations of RDF graphs. The best articulated thing I've seen in this vein is Sergey's GINF work. http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/ginf/ In particular http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/ginf/WD/ginf-overview/ shows use of RDF models representing messages to/from networked services of various kinds. From a similar perspective, the 'Extensible Languages' note argues that sending little message-bundles back and forth, using namespaces to draw on multiple simultaneous vocabularies, is the way to go: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-webarch-extlang Web Architecture: Extensible Languages W3C Note 10 Feb 1998 Authors: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> W3C Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> W3C [...] Excerpt: Mixing vocabularies When a message is sent across the Internet as part of a Web communications protocol, it is tempting as above to compare the message with a remote procedure call, and to adopt the characteristics of a procedure/method call from distributed OO systems. A procedure call identifies the target object, one of a finite number of methods from the exported interface, and a set of typed parameters. However, this analogy is not powerful enough. A message should be considered an expression and, if one takes an analogy with programming languages, the analogy should be with an expression or program rather than with a function call. [Or, if considered a function call, strictly, the parameters have to be extended to allow other nested function calls]. In this case, there may be many functions identified, in many interfaces. In other words, don't think of an HTTP message or an HTML document as an RPC call, but rather as the transmission of a expression in some language. or write my own simple protocol and just use RDF for describing new > bookmark nodes. I've gone with the second approach for now, but it strikes > me that the last thing the world needs is another hack protocol, and I'd be > interested in a better solution. Feels like there are two pieces of work here: a protocol for transacting with a remote (meta)data store and an RDF model for representing user bookmarks (perhaps using Dublin Core elements? [1]). My current interest lies more with the latter since some fairly cheesy shortcuts can (even in current browsers) provide genuinely useful remote bookmarking facilities... Dan [1] http://purl.org/dc/
Received on Sunday, 14 November 1999 20:23:56 UTC