XRDS Service Types
So nice to get a big win. There's been an ongoing, unanswered question in DataPortability. If we use XRDS-Simple as a way of listing services that the user provides, how do we know what URI to use for common service types? It felt like we needed a big list of service types that developers could agree on. Both those building XRDS files and those consuming them.

For some services, this seems relatively straight forwards. For instance a FOAF file in RDF-XML would have an entry in XRDS that looked like this.

<Service priority="1">

  <Type>http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/</Type>

  <MediaType>application/rdf+xml</MediaType>

  <URI>http://www.voidstar.com/foaf.xml</URI>

</Service>


http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ is the xmlns for FOAF, it redirects to the FOAF specs and the FOAF community have committed to maintaining the URL indefinitely. The MediaType is shown as RDF-XML to distinguish from N3 although this is optional because it will be discovered when a consumer GETs the file.

But for some services this is going to be harder to identify and is going to require some buy in from the community developing the service type. For instance it's not immediately obvious what the Type should be for the page containing my Microformatted list of Profile pages marked up with rel="me". One possibility would be http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 But there's no guarantee that will be around for ever. And we'd want to break it down a little more. We really need 3 types for
- My profile page
- My list of external profiles
- My list of contacts

Anyway, we made contact with Gabe Wachob, one of the architects of XRDS-Simple and he announced last night http://xrdstype.net/ to be both a clearing house for the big list of types and if necessary to be a place to host a Type URI.

Until this gets going we'll probably start a list on the DataPotability wiki.

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[ 05-May-08 6:48am ] [ ]