Re: SOAP services as database query interfaces / SOAP design patterns?

On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Mark Baker wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 12:07:45PM -0500, Dan Brickley wrote:
> > Sure. http://www.musicbrainz.org/showalbum.html?albumid=575 is a view into
> > a web site/service that returns an HTML description of the tracklisting
> > for a particular album by some recording artist. Somewhere on
> > musicbrainz.org there's an HTTP/URI/RDF web service that does the same
> > thing for a machine audience (sorry, don't have URI handy). It wouldn't be
> > hard to set up a SOAP/GET or SOAP/POST view into the same dataset. If I
> > did this with GET, eg. http://example.com/showalbum.soap.xml?ablumid=575
> > it'd be trivially easy for tools and services elsewhere in the Web to
> > generate URIs into my service that point straight into the lookup of that
> > item. If I used POST, it'd be significantly harder for other Web content
> > and services to reference that record within my SOAP service.
>
> Ok, but how do you want to use cataloguing in that example?

I would like a way of saying, using XML/RDF/URIs etc., that there exists a
service which can be consulted by passing it [such-and-so] arguments and
whose responses are (something like -- semi-invented example) a list of
descriptions of things of type mb:AlbumTrack, where the track descriptions
provide the tracknumber, trackname, tracklength and trackid properties for
each track in the album, where the album's [something or other] property
matches the appropriate argument we passed to the web service.  I'd like
to know whether ordering is significant in the XML response, and a few
other things useful for information retrieval apps (eg. whether query
expansions of any kind were performed).

A lot of lookup services have a similar pattern. You match some subset
from a collection of descriptions, and get back a list of hits, with
certain characteristics of each item provided.

Dan



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Received on Tuesday, 19 November 2002 15:13:01 UTC