Using read/write Linked Data for Application Integration - Towards a Linked Data Basic Profile
Arnaud J Le Hors, Martin Nally, Steve Speicher · 2012
Linked Data, as defined by Tim Berners-Lee’s 4 rules [1], has enjoyed considerable well-publicized success as a technology for publishing data in the World Wide Web [2]. The Rational group in IBM has for several years been employing a read/write usage of Linked Data as an architectural style for integrating a suite of applications, and we have shipped commercial products using this technology. We have found that this read/write usage of Linked Data has helped us solve several perennial problems that we had been unable to successfully solve with other application integration architectural styles that we have explored in the past. The applications we have integrated in IBM are primarily in the domains of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Integration System Management (ISM), but we believe that our experiences using read/write Linked Data to solve application integration problems could be broadly relevant and applicable within the IT industry. This paper explains why Linked Data, which builds on the existing World Wide Web infrastructure, presents some unique characteristics, such as being distributed and scalable, that may allow the industry to succeed where other application integration approaches have failed. It discusses lessons we have learned along the way and some of the challenges we have been facing in using Linked Data to integrate enterprise applications. Finally, we discuss several areas that could benefit from additional standard work and discuss several commonly applicable usage patterns along with proposals on how to address them using the existing W3C standards in the form of a Linked Data Basic Profile. This includes techniques applicable to clients and servers that read and write linked data, a type of container that allows new resources to be created using HTTP POST and existing resources to be found using HTTP GET (analogous to things like Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) [3]).