Subject: linking atom entries

From: Peter Keane <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:38:44 -0500

I know that there has been some discussion here and on rest-discuss (esp.
[1]) about relating existing resources on the web, and there seems to be no
real consensus view about mechanisms for "creating" those relationships and
"deleting" those relationships.  Obviously, we have links,  but how you
"assert" a relationship, say, by way of AtomPub is unclear.  My instinct is
to simply do the GET/PUT operation on an atom:entry, adding a link. But
since a link is not a resource, I don't have a good way to make any
assertions about the link (other than it's @rel value) or to "delete" the
link.  Of course I can do another GET/PUT this time excluding the link, but
that's potentially difficult to manage on the back end.

The use case is a large image collection managed in an Atom store (atompub
for all operations).  We need to record information about each image:
bibliographic source data, country of creation, artist, etc. and when
possible, we want that information to come from a standard thesaurus:  Getty
Geographic Name, Getty Union List of Artist names, Library of Congress Bib
Record, etc.   Let's say I can get an Atom representation of any entry in
one of those sources (each w/ a "self" link).  So I create links on each
item in my image catalog.  Any thoughts on how best to "manage" that
relationship?  Anyone else doing this sort of thing in w/ Atom?
(essentially creating a relational database "on the web" where I have on
table and someone else has the others).

--peter keane

[1] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/11383

---

From: Aristotle Pagaltzis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:49:47 +0100

* Peter Keane <[email-masked]> [2009-03-10 22:50]:
> Let's say I can get an Atom representation of any entry in one
> of those sources (each w/ a "self" link). So I create links on
> each item in my image catalog. Any thoughts on how best to
> "manage" that relationship? Anyone else doing this sort of
> thing in w/ Atom? (essentially creating a relational database
> "on the web" where I have on table and someone else has the
> others).

One possibility would be to treat this as a per-entry linkblog.
You would link a collection from the entry of primary interest,
in which links can themselves in turn be managed as Atom entries.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>