[uf-rest] RESTifying RAILs

[Danny Ayers]

On 11/4/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A big welcome to new member David Hanssonn, who is probably best
> known to you for an obscure little app framework he wrote in Ruby. :-)

Bravo!

Ernie, your points sound reasonable, but I'd come at the
Rails+microformats question from a different angle. Drifting off list
topic a little, sorry, but you know hobby horses, couple of cents
worth anyhow...

I believe the one thing above all that Rails could do to make
microformat-oriented apps easier and more useful, would be to support
an RDF store backend (in addition to, or as an alternative to the SQL
storage).

The primary justification is that data from any microformat could be
manipulated uniformly in a single, consistent model. It's a
Web-oriented model, as the IDs and relations within it are done using
URIs.

For example, say you wanted your app to support both XFN and hCard.
These both have a person as their main entity of interest, yet their
syntax and general structure is slightly different. Mapped across to
SQL, it would be hard to avoid having one table for the XFN kind of
person and another table for the hCard kind of person. With RDF, the
integration of the two kinds of data into a common structure  is
pretty much a non-brainer.

A secondary benefit is that the data could also be exposed RESTfully
directly from the store (perhaps via SPARQL), making any application
built this way automatically part of the Semantic Web.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com