Nathan wrote:
Kingsley Idehen wrote:
Nathan wrote:
Leigh Dodds wrote:
Hi all,
Yesterday, at the 2nd Linked Data London Meetup, Dave Reynolds, Jeni
Tennison and myself ran a workshop introducing some work we've been
doing around a "Linked Data API".
The API is intended to be a middle-ware layer that can be deployed
in-front of a SPARQL endpoint, providing the ability to create a
RESTful data access layer for accessing the RDF data contained in the
triple store. The middle-ware is configurable, and is intended to
support a range of different access patterns and output formats. "Out
of the box" the system provides delivery of the standard range of RDF
serialisations, as well as simple JSON and XML serializations for
descriptions of lists of resources. The API essentially maps
parameterized URLs to underlying SPARQL queries, mediating the content
negotiation of the results into a suitable format for the client.
The current draft specification is at:
http://purl.org/linked-data/api/spec
If I may make a suggestion; I'd like you to consider including the
formed SPARQL query in with the return; so that developers can get used
to the language and see how similar to existing SQL etc etc..
For all this middle-ware is needed in the interim and provides access to
the masses, surely an extra chance to introduce developers to linked
data / rdf / sparql is a good thing?
Of course!
ODBC / JDBC don't take SQL out of scope. Thus, the EAV graph model
equivalent shouldn't take SPARQL out of scope.
Entity Framework doesn't take EntitySQL out of scope (this the less
capable SPARQL equivalent in the ADO.NET realm).
Yup, I wasn't going to say anything, but may as well for what it's worth
(no disrespect meant, I totally sympathise with what you are all trying
to do being in the web service / api land myself for many years).
Here's what I see happening: Developers accessing the data through the
API, downloading it, parsing it in to an RDBMS using their own table /
class structure and then querying it locally with SQL. (And quite
possibly then turning it in to a CSV!)
Final destination is only a problem if the URIs get shredded along the
way. Basically, nothing stops us having hypermedia CSV if the links are
intact :-)
The API should simply provide a uniform high level RESTful interface
performing CRUD operations against Linked Data Objects/Resources.
Kingsley.
I wish I had something useful to say here, after the above, but I don't
:( All I can say is that for those who SQL, SPARQL will take about a day
to get started with, as probably will the linked data api (after you
read the docs and get setup etc).
Many Regards,
Nathan
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
