Hello.
I'm looking at the idea of automatically establishing two-way links
between resources--in particular, sioc:reply_of and sioc:has_reply
between two posts, one of which is a reply to the other. If such a
mechanism were in place, various communities could automatically link
together to form a sort of a distributed discussion space, and threads
could be followed from one site to another.
Do you think this is a good/useful idea?
Are there any implementations of it that I'm missing?
Now there are several ways of accomplishing this already deployed on the
Web, such as trackbacks[1] and pingbacks[2]. I'm considering if they
could be used "as is" for the purpose. However, in my view they have an
important drawback: they only assert that there is *some* kind of
relation or link between two resources; (e.g. WordPress, as it seems,
automatically pings back every resource that's linked to from a post).
Thus if we were to use trackbacks or pingbacks for establishing
*semantic* links, the receiving end of the trackback would need to
compare the entire description of a resource to its own previous
conceptions of it (to infer what has been created or changed). If the
relationship would be identified in the protocol itself, life would be
easier.
Do you think trackbacks/pingbacks would suffice for the purpose I
described?
FWIW, I've written some code to illustrate a possible trackback-like
protocol for making arbitrary semantic links between resources. Say we
have a post Y that is a reply to post X. The protocol consists of three
steps:
1. Y's server requests an (RDF) description of X and searches for a
certain statement of the form "X has_siocback Z". Z is the trackback
("siocback") resource for X (could be X itself).
2. Y sends a POST request to Z with three parameters--subject, predicate
and object--which together form a triple identifying the new
relationship. In our case, "Y sioc:reply_of X".
3. Z applies adds the statement "X sioc:has_reply Y" to its description
of X. Now clients obtaining the "authoritative" description of X will
see that has a reply Y.
My example[3] implements this in a context of a trivial blog-like site.
It needs Python 2, CherryPy 3 and RDFLib. Interested people could fire
up a few copies and see how they establish the links.
Feedback welcome.
[1] http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/docs/trackback_spec
[2] http://hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback-1.0
[3] http://sioc-dev.googlegroups.com/web/siocback.py
--
Vasiliy Faronov
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