Standards » Infrastructure Area » OCCI WG

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 description 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.