WSDL, RDF and REST

Mark --

One of your responses to my posted question about objects in web services
has gotten me thinking about something else.  I am by no means confident
that this makes any sense, but let me give it a shot anyway:

It seems to me that one of the major points of difference between the REST
folks and others that are less easy to characterize with one word has to do
with verbs.  The web services folk are putting them into XML as data and the
REST folk would prefer to have a limited set of verbs on which there is more
or less universal consensus.

Would it be helpful if the Web Services architecture specified in some way
that the list of verbs that are understood by a web service can be, or
should be, semantically described via RDF in metadata that enhances the WSDL
decription of the service?  I wouldn't know exactly how to do this myself,
but it is my understanding that this is the kind of thing that RDF is
supposed to do.  If this were done, I could see consumers of the WSDL
automatically processing this RDF to provide design assistance and
constraints.  It seems to me that this might be viewed as really useful by
one side of this debate and more valid and scalable by the other.

Well, maybe this is wishful thinking, but I'd really like to see something
that would bring people closer to a win-win on these issues.  Does this
thought have any chance of moving things in that direction? 

Received on Thursday, 10 October 2002 21:47:32 UTC