On 4/16/13 1:52 PM, Luca Matteis wrote:
Fine, but it's really important that you understand the fundamental difference between SPARQL and (a) RESTFul API.I have recently created Restpark: http://lmatteis.github.io/restpark/It's my way of pushing a standard RESTful interface for accessing RDF data. Still in its very infancy but hopefully it can be something to consider. I personally think the Semantic Web community desperately needs a simpler protocol for querying RDF, along side SPARQL. I have nothing against SPARQL, it's an important standard to have. But something simpler and RESTful needs to be part of the Semantic Web stack.The entire web community is used to consuming APIs as simple HTTP requests (REST). Would you imagine GitHub, Flickr, or any other web-service API actually exposing SQL instead of their RESTful API? It would make things a bit more complicated for third-parties in my opinion, but more importantly it would make things so much more complicated for services to implement.I would love to think what the community thinks about this. Best, Luca
SPARQL (via SPARQL-Protocol) offers a declarative query language that extends HTTP. Thus, it incorporates RESTful interaction and more.
There is not such thing as one RESTFul API that will be accepted by all. And even if such a thing miraculously manifests, it will be unable to handle the different data access and interactions dimensions that are the basis for declarative query languages. Thus, you will always end up with an ever increasing number of divergent APIs that simply won't scale.
In the SQL RDBMS world you have the likes of ODBC, JDBC etc.. Even as vast as these APIs are re. RDBMS abstraction, you still don't have anything what would match the ability to execute SQL uniformly over HTTP against any RDBMS. I have nothing against REST, but I think we do need to put it into appropriate perspective.
SPARQL scales while RESTful APIs don't or won't, for the reasons I've outlined above. Of course, RESFTful APIs are good mechanisms for accelerating SPARQL appreciation :-)
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