Creating non-Atom LDPRs: AtomStrict & AtomRelax

The LDP Model wiki [1] develops in detail the relation between
Atom and LDP. It has an example of posting an Atom Entry to 
a container, and an example of posting a binary. This received
Erik Wilde's approval.

But a remaining question subsists: What happens when posting 
other types of RDF content, such a as a foaf profile like this:

<> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument;
   foaf:primaryTopic <#i> .

<#i> a foaf:Person;
   foaf:name "Jack Daniels";
   foaf:interest <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey>;
   foaf:knows <http://www.spiritofspeyside.com/#j>,
        <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .

[] a <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Whisky> ;
   likes <#i>, <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .


This graphs gives data about some "Jack Daniels", and he also
adds a statement that Jack likes a whiskey that Jim likes.

Following the Atom models can lead us down two 
different paths, which I will call Atom-Strict and Atom Relax.

Atom Strict
===========

In Atom Strict you can only post an Entry to a container.
The content has to be wrapped in an atom entry. So if we
are dead strict we have to POST this in XML:

<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title>My foaf profile</title>
  <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-bbbb-80da344efa6a</id>
  <updated>2013-02-02T16:34:06Z</updated>
  <author><name>Jack Daniels</name></author>
  <content type="text/turtle">
    <> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument;
       foaf:primaryTopic <#i> .

  <#i> a foaf:Person;
     foaf:name "Jack Daniels";
     foaf:interest <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey>;
     foaf:knows <http://www.spiritofspeyside.com/#j>,
                <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .

  [] a <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Whisky> ;
     likes <#i>, <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .
   </content>
</entry>

This forces us to have two content types: application/atom+xml and
the text/turtle content.

POSTing the whole thing Turtle improve things only a bit:

<> a :Entry;
   :title "My foaf profile";
   :updated "2013-02-02T16:34:06Z"^^xsd:dateTime;
   :author [ :name "Jack Daniels" ];
   :content """
     <> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument;
       foaf:primaryTopic <#i> .

  <#i> a foaf:Person;
     foaf:name "Jack Daniels";
     foaf:interest <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey>;
     foaf:knows <http://www.spiritofspeyside.com/#j>,
                <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .

  [] a <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Whisky> ;
     likes <#i>, <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .
  """^^^xxx:Turtle .

Here we only have 1 syntax but we still have the data and the 
metadata as two seperate contents.

In both cases there are a number of serious problems:

 1. The content's relative URLs must be abosolutized - meaning we can't really get the 
    server to do the right job. N3 could help here, but it is not in a standards track.
 2. The content must be encoded to remove and angle brackets in the XML format and 
   to make sure there are no """ in the Turtle one ( and """ are legal in Turtle )
 3. There is a level of indirection between the metadata and the content.
 4. There seems to be duplication such as the author between 
   the content and the metadata.

Could this be solved by extending Atom so that one could have

<> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument, a :Entry;
   foaf:primaryTopic <#i>;
   content ...?

Perhaps one can, but one wonders what should go into the atom:content 
relation then? Does every document need an atom:id and a summary? It seems
like a Procustean exercise. I think it is much better if we stick to 
thinking about Atom as a metadata vocabulary. Things will then work
out much better as we will see in the next section:


Atom-Relax
==========

Whether or not any content one posts is in fact an atom entry or not 
( which it might well be! ), it seems clear that what one really wants
is to POST the following to the <http://drinks.example/account/> 
container:

-------------------------------------
POST /account/ HTTP/1.1
Slug: jack
Content-Type: text/turtle
...

<> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument;
   foaf:primaryTopic <#i> .

<#i> a foaf:Person;
   foaf:name "Jack Daniels";
   foaf:interest <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey>;
   foaf:knows <http://www.spiritofspeyside.com/#j>,
        <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .

[] a <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Whisky> ;
   likes <#i>, <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .
-------------------------------------

Having posted this it should add to the container </account/>
the following triple at least:

  <> rdfs:member <jack> .

to be precise in n3:

</account/> log:semantics [ log:includes { </bug/> rdfs:member <req1> } ]

So what *else* should the container show? Should it show everything 
that was sent too?  This clearly won't work because it would have to show
triples such as 

{
 [] a <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Whisky> ;
   likes <#i>, <http://www.bunnahabhain.com/#jim> .
}

That are pretty detached from the container. What if the
graph sent had contained the following:

<http://drinks.example/account/> rdfs:member <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Whisky> .
 
perhaps as a joke? Then  a GET on <http://drinks.example/account/>
would return

<> rdfs:member <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Whisky> .

which would clearly be false, since drinks.example can't delete
resources on dbpedia.

So here the atom metadata role starts making sense. It makes sense
not to put much information into the ldp:Container that is inside
the content, other than its type perhaps, but rather to add 
the atom metadata about what the contents contain, namely 

----------------------------------
GET /account/ HTTP/1.1
----------------------->>
<> a ldp:Container;
   rdfs:member [ owl:sameAs <jack>; 
                 a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument;
                 :title "Jack's personal Profile";
                 :id "http://drinks.example/account/jack";
                 :edit-meta <jack;meta>;
                 :author <jack#i> ] .
----------------------------------

Then one does not confuse the container's role as maker
of metadata statements of its contents, and the contents.
Atom does not confuse it, and neither should we, as those are
very fundamental distinctions, between asserting something,
and asserting things about another assertion.  Ie between you
saying

   A: Jane loves Joe.

And you saying 

   B: Jim at 5 pm on Sunday said Jane loves Joe

You may be able to say B quite truthfully, but not want to 
make the statement A directly yourself.

The container, will be much more secure by restricting 
itself to the second.                  

Henry

[1] http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/wiki/ISSUE-37



Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/