[redland-dev] HTTP interfaces to RDF models

[Jo Walsh]

On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 11:34:52AM +0200, Danny Ayers wrote:
> > It's not clear to me if there is anything that's evolving
> > into a 'standard' protocol.
> 
> For read-only querying at least, the SPARQL protocol [1] (scroll past
> the XML Schema bits!) seems to be the point of convergence, for
> instance see comments re. Joseki [2].

this sounds like a great effort, and like it makes sense to POST or
even to GET SPARQL queries and get an RDF greph in XML back in return.
i found an old, slightly messy position paper from when i was thinking
about this a while ago.
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/20031113-storage/positions/walsh.html

experiments with it suggested that it would work well to have a
standard list of namespace abbreviations so one didn't have to send
'USING foo for http://foo.com/' type statements about headers along
with each query. You could ask a http server for an agreed URI and it
would send back a list which looked something like this:
http://map.wirelesslondon.info/docs/boot.xml

if there were any de facto standard i would be keen to make an
implementation.


-jo