Re: Uniform access to descriptions

In response to my own call for use cases (I'm still waiting for Atom  
and POWDER scenarios):

Uniform access to descriptions: Document publisher use case

Acme Publishing is an established publisher of academic journals  
serving thousands of hits on its corpus of PDF files daily. It has  
learned about RDF and in order to promote its journals wishes to  
provide bibliographic information for its articles in RDF, to assist  
automated agents that are RDF-aware.

Although the PDF files have a place to put metadata, this is deemed  
an unsuitable location as (1) many of its millions of PDF articles  
are quite old and regenerating them is so risky as to be infeasible,  
and (2) Acme judges that it is unreasonable to expect that client  
software will know how to parse a PDF to get at the metadata.

Acme's first approach is to create a CGI script that takes the  
article's URI as input and returns the bibliographic RDF for that  
article. This gets few adopters and the publisher realizes that  
monolithic action will not be very effective. At a trade conference  
they realize that other publishers are having the same thought, and  
there is discussion of how they can standardize so that agents can be  
generic across various publishers - indeed over the whole web.

Minimal modifications to its web server, such as CGI scripts, special  
response headers, or new HTTP request methods are within budget.  
Asking existing customers to change the URLs they're already using,  
or to change the way they use HTTP, is not acceptable.

Received on Monday, 24 March 2008 18:42:11 UTC