Tab You Latter



Filed under: June 23, 2009, 1:46 pmFiled under: Uncategorized

Over the last couple of days I’ve had some time to think, but not much time to do. The first thing I’ve been thinking about is how to test the redirection of requests based on request type for my theoretical new site. The way this is meant to work is that you publish your data with a URI that looks like:

http://%5Bmy site]/resource/[ID of the item]

If someone makes a request to this URI the server inspects what type of request it is, if it is a “application/rdf+xml” request then it is redirected to:

http://%5Bmy site]/data/[ID of the item]

If it is a request of type “text/html” then it is redirected to:

http://%5Bmy site]/page/[ID of the item]

This allows the you to publish the data with one common URI, but provide different views on the data depending on how it is requested. There are other schemes out there, but this one fits in nicely with the URI rewriting functionality of the .Net MVC framework so it’s what I’m planning to run with.

One thing I’m not sure about is if I make a HTML request to the RDF specific URI (or vice versa), should I be courtious to redirect the request to where I think it should go or at this stage are we past the point of hand holding? I’m probably going to go with the former unless I find out something different.

As well as thinking about these things I was thinking about how to test it. I’ve previously mentioned the data browsers Disco and Tabulator. Disco has been my favourite because I found it easy work with, it’s very straight forward, go to the site, give it a URI, it does the rest. The drawback with it is that it only works with URIs that are public, if I’m still testing the basics of my application, I don’t want it out there for the whole world to see. So I gave Tabulator another go and I don’t see how I got it wrong before. It too is very straight forward. It’s a Firefox add-in (yet another one…) so anything you can point your browser can see, it can work with. Need to test if your redirection is working OK? Simply go to Tools -> Data Browser -> Make Firefox request RDF and toggle as required.

While I was perusing the web I also came across this great introduction to linked data. It’s written from the standpoint of someone working with library data (I told you they love this stuff) which colours the examples but it does a good job of laying down the foundations.