[by Chimezie Ogbuji]
I've been working with roll-your-own content repositories long enough to know that open standards are long overdue.
The slides for my Semantic Technology Conference 2007 session are up: "Tools for the Next Generation of CMS: XML, RDF, & GRDDL" (Open Office) and (Power point)
This afternoon, I merged documentation of the 4Suite repository from old bits (and some new) into a Wiki that I hope to contribute to (every now and then).
I think there is plenty of mature, supporting material upon which a canon of best practices for XML/RDF CMSes can be written, with normative dependencies on:
- GRDDL
- XProc
- Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
- URI RFCs
- Rich Web Application Backplane
- XML / XML Base / XML Infoset
- RDDL
- XHTML 1.0
- SPARQL / Versa (RDF querying)
- XPath 2.0 (JSR 283 restriction) with 1.0 'fallback'
- HTTP 1.0/1.1, ACL-based HTTP Basic / Digest authentication, and a convention for Web-based XSLT invokation
- Document/graph-level ACL granularity
The things that are missing:
- RDF equivalent of DOM Level 3 (transactional, named graphs, connection management, triple patterns, ... ) with events.
- A mature RIF (there is always SWRL, Notation 3, and DLP) as a framework for SW expert systems (and sentient resource management)
- A RESTful service description to complement the current WSDL/SOAP one
For a RESTful service description, RDF Forms can be employed to describe transport semantics (to help with Agent autonomy), or a mapping to the Atom Publishing Protocol (and a thus a subset of GData) can be written.
In my session, I emphasized how closely JSR 283 overlaps with the 4Suite Repository API.
The delta between them mostly has to do with RDF, other additional XML processing specifications (XUpdate, XInclude, etc.), ACL-based HTTP authentication (basic, and sessions), HTTP/XSLT bindings, and other miscellaneous bells and whistles