[occi-wg] References in OCCI schema (JSON) and W3C Linked Data

[Gary Mazz]

Hi,

Sorry this took so long, the day job and family  stuff is taking up time.

  I took a deeper dive into W3C Linked Data as input to reconciling 
References for the JSON specification.Linked Data is a mechanism to 
create a "web of data".  Under the W3C, Linked Data is identified and 
addressed though HTTP URIs.  Currently, the W3C has Linked Data defined 
in several specifications including RDF, RDFa, GRDDL, POWDER, Semantic 
Annotation and Provenance. Many of W3C work products are implemented 
using XML data representations.

In some cases, identified OCCI and external Resources will not always be 
addressable by HTTP.  In some environments, URIs are required to be 
defined as non-HTTP URLs. Service Location Protocol RFC2808, commonly 
used by iSCSI servers, is one such case.  iSCSI is another case.

The OCCI Core document defines an 'id' attribute for all Entity objects 
(Resources and Links) as a URI. No reference to HTTP is included with 
the URI definition.  In this case, URI is intended to be media agnostic.

In OCCI's HTTP specification, OCCI URIs are defined as HTTP URI with no 
recognizable support for alternate media identifiers ie iSCSI. One 
position on this practice is that Alternate Identifiers could be 
considered implicitly defined in the rendering specification of an OCCI 
Reference.   However, a more pragmatic commentary of this practice would 
consider Alternate Identifiers as undefined strings. A best practice 
could consider the Mixin as a vehicle to specify URI media type.

This email does not draw conclusions of make any significant 
recommendations. It has the sole purpose to identify issues surrounding 
Refernces and links for JSON rendering specification. Discussion is the 
obvious next step towards reconciliation.

cheers,
gary