--- a/rdf-spaces/index.html Thu May 10 07:08:31 2012 -0400
+++ b/rdf-spaces/index.html Thu May 10 08:05:37 2012 -0400
@@ -125,13 +125,13 @@
<p>The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/">Resource
Description Framework (RDF)</a> provides a simple declarative way
- to store and transmit information. It provides a trivial but
+ to store and transmit information. It alos provides a trivial but
effective way to combine information from multiple sources, with
graph merging. This allows information from different people,
different organizations, different units within an organization,
- different servers, different algorithms, etc, to all combined and
- used together, without any special processing or understanding of
- the relationships among the providers.</p>
+ different servers, different algorithms, etc, to all be combined
+ and used together, without any special processing or understanding
+ of the relationships among the providers.</p>
<p>The basic RDF merge operation may be overly simplistic, though,
as extra processing and an understanding of the relationships
@@ -140,17 +140,132 @@
by modeling each one as a separate <em>space</em>, and using RDF to
express information about these spaces. In addition to this
important concept, we provide a pair of languages—extensions
- to exsiting RDF syntaxes— which can be used to store or
+ to existing RDF syntaxes— which can be used to store or
transmit in one document the contents of multiple spaces as well
as information about them.
- <p>This approach allows for a variety of <a href="#use-cases">use
- cases</a> to be addressed in a straightforward manner, as shown
- in <a href="deailed-example" class="sectionRef"></a>.</p>
+ <p>This approach allows for a variety of use cases (immediately
+ below) to be addressed in a straightforward manner, as shown in <a
+ href="#detailed-example" class="sectionRef"></a>.</p>
</section>
<section>
+ <h2>Use Cases</h2>
+
+ <p>Each of these use cases is initally described in terms of the
+ following scenario. Details of how each use case is handled by the
+ <em>RDF spaces</em> design are in <a href="#detailed-example"
+ class="sectionRef"></a>.</p>
+
+ <blockquote style="font-style: italic">
+
+ <p>The Example Foundation is a large organization with more than
+ ten thousand employees and volunteers, spread out over five
+ continents. It has branches in 25 different countries, and those
+ divisions have considerable autonomy; they are only loosely
+ controlled by the parent organization (called "headquarters" or
+ "HQ") in Geneva.</p>
+
+ <p>HQ wants to help the divisions work together better, and
+ decides a first step is to provide a simple but complete directory
+ of all the Example personnel. Until now, each division has
+ maintained its own directory, using its own technology. HQ would
+ like to be able to find someone's phone number, mailing address,
+ and job title, knowing only their name or email addresses. Later,
+ they hope to extend the system to allow finding people based on
+ their areas of interest and expertise.</p>
+
+ <p>HQ decides to use RDF with the <a
+ href="http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf/">the vcard-rdf
+ vocabulary</a>. They ask each division to put an up-to-date
+ directory somewhere on the Web, and mail carol@hq.example.org the
+ URL. They say: "Just tell Carol the username/password if there is
+ one, or make it only available to the IP address of
+ dir.hq.example.org." Carol maintains a file which lists the URLs
+ and any username/password combinations she is given.</p>
+
+ </blockquote>
+
+ <p>For the first iteration of the design of their directory, HQ
+ builds a "harvester" which uses Carol's file for input and fetches
+ all the listed data feeds. It operates behind a caching Web proxy,
+ so that if the divisions set the right HTTP headers (eg Expires and
+ Last-Modified) the load on their servers is minimal, even if HQ runs
+ the harvester every few minutes.</p>
+
+ <p>The harvester parses the RDF from each data source and loads it
+ into an in-memory triplestore, merging each new graph. Once it's
+ done with all the harvesting, the harvester writes out the merged
+ graph into a Turtle file. The file is published (with access
+ control) where it can be used by several different clients providing
+ directory search services.</p>
+
+ <p>Although HQ provides a Web-based client, they makes the raw
+ merged data available, because the divisions have programmers and HQ
+ knows people will want mobile clients, SMS-based clients,
+ command-line clients on different operating systems, and possibly
+ even clients that do something more sophisticated than just looking
+ up a phone numer. By making the raw data available, they empower
+ the divisions to supply all these other applications.</p>
+
+ <section>
+ <h2>Minimizing Reloads</h2>
+
+ <p>@@@ just change the parts that changed, allowing for very cheap updates </p>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <h2>Showing Provenance</h2>
+
+ <p>@@@ the released db shows which dept supplies each part of the information </p>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <h2>Maintaining Derived Data</h2>
+
+ <p>@@@ namefill is needed, and its results need their own provenance</p>
+ </section>
+
+
+ <section>
+ <h2>Distributed Harvesting</h2>
+
+ <p>@@@ divisions gather from departments who might gather from
+ individuals </p>
+
+ </section>
+
+
+ <section>
+ <h2>Showing Revision History</h2>
+
+ <p>@@@ we want to be able to see all the changes, for auditing, to
+ see what the DB said about anyone at any point in time.
+ (transaction time)</p>
+ </section>
+
+
+ <section>
+ <h2>Expressing Past of Future States</h2>
+
+ <p>@@@ we want to be able to express when someone started and stopped having a particular role various ways, which might not be the time we put this into the db.
+ </p>
+ </section>
+
+
+ <section>
+ <h2>Vendor-Neutral SPARQL Backup</h2>
+
+ <p>@@@ we want to be able to dump the database and load it in a different system</p>
+ </section>
+
+
+</section>
+
+
+
+<section>
<h2>Concepts</h2>
<section>
@@ -349,14 +464,6 @@
</section>
-<section>
- <h2>Use Cases</h2>
-
- <p>TBD. See <a href="#detailed-example" class="sectionRef"></a> for now.</p>
-
-</section>
-
-
<section id="syntax">
<h2>Dataset Languages</h2>
@@ -468,6 +575,9 @@
<section class="informative">
<h2>Detailed Example</h2>
+ <p>@@@ this needs to be updated to just show the results of the
+ problems described in the Use Cases section.</p>
+
<p>This section presents a design for using spaces in constructing a
federated information system. It is intended to help explain and
motivate RDF <a>data space</a>s.</p>