RDF document metadata - metadata

I have a software that generates an RDF representation of certain dataset. I want to add to the generated data also some metadata describing not specific data contained in the data set but the document itself - i.e., when the document was created, by which software, which version, etc. The schema.org properties provide the necessary relationships, but I can not figure out the proper place to attach it. Is there some standard way of saying "this is the metadata about the document itself" in RDF? I use Turtle serialization for RDF but generic answer working with any serialization would be preferable.

There is not a standard place to do this. A RDF graph is just a collection of triples; it's not identified by an IRI or anything like that. (However, in SPARQL datasets, you could post some metadata about a named graph by using the name of the graph as the subject in a triple. That would just be a convention, though. It's not "official" in any sense.)
In the RDF serializations of OWL ontologies, there can be an ontology element (i.e., a resource with the type owl:Ontology), and that can be used to associate some metadata with the ontology. You'd probably want to adopt an approach like that. That is, you'd establish a convention with something like
#prefix ex: <...>
[] a ex:DatasetRepresentation ;
ex:created "..." ;
ex:representationOf <...> .
#... rest of generated content ...

I am not that familiar with Schema.org, but both DCat and Doublin Core provide means to do so.
In Doublin Core there is the identifier Data property. An example:
PREFIX : <http://my.domain/meta-data#>
PREFIX dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
:1 a dcterms:BibliographicResource ;
dcterms:identifier <http://my.domain/my-document> .
A similar record but now using DCat and the landingPage data property:
PREFIX : <http://my.domain/meta-data#>
PREFIX dcat: <http://www.w3.org/ns/dcat#>
:1 a dcat:Resource ;
dcat:landingPage <http://my.domain/my-document> .

Related

How to isolate a list of URIs in a RDF file using CONSTRUCT or DESCRIBE in SPARQL?

I'm trying to get only a list of URIs in RDF instead of a list of triples:
PREFIX gr: <http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#>
PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
DESCRIBE ?product
WHERE
{
?product rdfs:subClassOf gr:ProductOrService .
}
Using SELECT, instead of DESCRIBE I receive only the subject (which I want), but not as an RDF but like a SPARQL Result with binds, vars, etc.
Using CONSTRUCT, I can't specify only the ?product, as above, so the closest I can get is:
PREFIX gr: <http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#>
PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
CONSTRUCT
WHERE
{
?product rdfs:subClassOf gr:ProductOrService .
}
Which returns an RDF with triples of different products, but the same properties and objects.
It looks like you should read over the SPARQL specification, which tells you that this is exactly as expected. To get the single column you wish, you must use SELECT.
SPARQL has four query forms. These query forms use the solutions from pattern matching to form result sets or RDF graphs. The query forms are:
SELECT
Returns all, or a subset of, the variables bound in a query pattern match.
CONSTRUCT
Returns an RDF graph constructed by substituting variables in a set of triple templates.
ASK
Returns a boolean indicating whether a query pattern matches or not.
DESCRIBE
Returns an RDF graph that describes the resources found.
I found a solution. I've used SELECT, but instead of binds and vars, as output received a "Comma-Separated Values (with fields in N-Triples syntax)" CSV file:
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Real_estate>
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Automobile>
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Auction>
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Video_game>
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Campsite>
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Car>
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Audiobook>
<http://www.productontology.org/id/Browser_game>
...
Representing the result of a SPARQL SELECT query as an RDF List is a tooling issue - it is not something that can be solved in SPARQL in general.
Some SPARQL tools may have ways to support rendering the query result as an RDF list. But it's not something you can fix by just formulating your query differently, you'll need to use a tool to (programmatically) format the result.
In Java, using Eclipse RDF4J, you can do it as follows (untested so you may need to tweak it to work properly, but it should give you a general idea):
String query = "SELECT ?product WHERE { ?product rdfs:subClassOf gr:ProductOrService . }";
// do the query on repo and convert to a Java list of URI objects
List<URI> results = Repositories.tupleQuery(
repo,
query,
r -> QueryResults.stream(r).map(bs -> (URI)bs.getValue("product")).collect(Collectors.toList()
);
// create a resource (bnode or URI) for the start of the rdf:List
Resource head = SimpleValueFactory.getInstance().createBNode();
// convert the Java list of results to an rdf:list and add it
// to a newly-created RDF Model
Model m = RDFCollections.asRDF(results, head, new LinkedHashModel());
Once you have your result as an RDF model you can use any of the existing RDF4J APIs to write it to file or to store it in a triplestore.
Now, I am not claiming that any of this is a good idea - I have never seen a use case for something like this. But this is how I would do it if it were necessary.

RESTful reordering of nested objects

I have a RESTful API that supports two objects so as object A contains an ordered list of nested objects B:
Create object A - POST /a
Create object B and add to A - POST /a/<id>/b
Update object B in A - PATCH /a/<id>/b/<id>
What would be a RESTful way to update the order of B objects in a specific A?
Option 1: PATCH /a/<id> with json content that replaces A.Bs
A has a list of embedded Bs, namely A.Bs so you can replace that list in its entirety also changing the order on the way. This relies on the client to resubmit the entire list correctly.
Option 2: PATCH /a/<id> with json content that replaces A.B_order
Add a separate list of B ids and have the client update it. This is similar to Option 1 but does not rely on the client resubmitting all the objects. It does require the server to manage the list, updating it upon B creation, and validating the update contains all the required B ids on list order update.
Option 3: PATCH /a/<id>/b with json content that replaces A.Bs
The same as Option 1, but with a different URL
Which would be most RESTful and clear?
Any other options?
I would suggest using the proposed standard defined in RFC 6902. Specifically, the "move" op would seem to be what you're looking for.
Given Foo has Bars and Bars are resources (have ID or link), when you need to reorder foo.bars then I would suggest:
’PUT /foos/:id/bars’ with array of IDs or links in the body.
But if Bars are not resources (have no ID), then:
’PATCH /foos/:id’ with body of Foo including complete new array of Foo.bars in the ’bars’ property.
The question I would ask myself is: "What does 'order' mean in this case".
The specific instances of B don't have an order between them. They're all independent resources that are not really 'aware' of each order.
Given that, it's not really the B resource that you are changing. What are you changing?
Presumably there is a collection of B's somewhere. You do a GET request on that collection to get an ordered list of B's. Do you get that list on /a/<id> or on /a/<id>/b ?.
Wherever that ordered list is, I would also do the operation to change the order because the order is a 'property' of the collection.
So for the sake of the argument, lets assume that your 'collection of B lives on /a/<id>b. What format should that be?
Well, a good REST service will replace the entire state. So as a default I would do a PUT request on that resource and do a full replace of the entire thing.
If you don't like that idea and want to use PATCH to update only a part of the collection (and nothing else), I think I would opt for one of these:
Use a standard format, like json-patch.
Come up with your own syntax to describe this.
Option 2 will likely be a lot simpler to implement, and I would also keep the format as simple as possible.
If you use a format like HAL, a collection is probably a list of links. In that case I would use a syntax like:
{
"_links": {
"item": [
{ "href": "/a/<id>/b/ordered-item-1" },
{ "href": "/a/<id>/b/ordered-item-2" }
]
}
}
If you don't have a hypermedia-style API, you probably use id's and force the client to expand id's in urls. In that case, I'd imagine the format could look like:
{
"items": [ 1, 3, 5, 2]
}
In each case, it's a Good Idea to define your own media type for this, because this format for PATCH has special meaning to your api. For example:
application/vnd.jonathan.patch+json

Generate XML from XML schema xsd in 4GL Progess OpenEdge?

iam using 4GL in Progress OpenEdge 11.3 and i want to write a xml file from xsd schema file.
Can i generate a xml file from a XML Schema (xsd) with 4GL Progress OpenEdge?
thanks.
Well, you can use a method called READ-XMLSCHEMA (and it's counterpart WRITE-XMLSCHEMA).
These can be applied to both TEMP-TABLES and ProDataSets (depending of the complexity of the xml).
The ProDataSet documentation, found here, contains quite a lot information about this. There's also a book called Working with XML that can help you.
This is the basic syntax of READ-XMLSCHEMA (when working with datasets):
READ-XMLSCHEMA ( source-type, { file | memptr | handle | longchar },
override-default-mapping [, field-type-mapping [, verify-schema-mode ] ] ).
A basic example would be:
DATASET ds:READ-XMLSCHEMA("file", "c:\temp\file.xsd", FALSE).
However since you need to work with the actual XML you also will have to handle data. That data is handled in the TEMP-TABLES contained withing the Dataset. It might be easier to start with creating a static ProDataSet that corresponds to the schema and then handle it's data whatever way you want.

Text classification using Weka

I'm a beginner to Weka and I'm trying to use it for text classification. I have seen how to StringToWordVector filter for classification. My question is, is there any way to add more features to the text I'm classifying? For example, if I wanted to add POS tags and named entity tags to the text, how would I use these features in a classifier?
It depends of the format of your dataset and the preprocessing steps you perform. For instance, let us suppose that you have pre-POS-tagged your texts, looking like:
The_det dog_n barks_v ._p
So you can build an specific tokenizer (see weka.core.tokenizers) to generate two tokens per word, one would be "The" and the other one would be "The_det" so you keep the tag information.
If you want only tagged words, then you can just ensure that "_" is not a delimiter in the weka.core.tokenizers.WordTokenizer.
My advice is to have both the words and tagged words, so a simpler way would be to write an script that joins the texts and the tagged texts. From a file containing "The dog barks" and another one cointaining "The_det dog_n barks_v ._p", it would generate a file with "The The_det dog dog_n barks barks_v . ._p". You may even forget about the order unless you are going to make use of n-grams.

RESTful URL design for search

I'm looking for a reasonable way to represent searches as a RESTful URLs.
The setup: I have two models, Cars and Garages, where Cars can be in Garages. So my urls look like:
/car/xxxx
xxx == car id
returns car with given id
/garage/yyy
yyy = garage id
returns garage with given id
A Car can exist on its own (hence the /car), or it can exist in a garage. What's the right way to represent, say, all the cars in a given garage? Something like:
/garage/yyy/cars ?
How about the union of cars in garage yyy and zzz?
What's the right way to represent a search for cars with certain attributes? Say: show me all blue sedans with 4 doors :
/car/search?color=blue&type=sedan&doors=4
or should it be /cars instead?
The use of "search" seems inappropriate there - what's a better way / term? Should it just be:
/cars/?color=blue&type=sedan&doors=4
Should the search parameters be part of the PATHINFO or QUERYSTRING?
In short, I'm looking for guidance for cross-model REST url design, and for search.
[Update] I like Justin's answer, but he doesn't cover the multi-field search case:
/cars/color:blue/type:sedan/doors:4
or something like that. How do we go from
/cars/color/blue
to the multiple field case?
For the searching, use querystrings. This is perfectly RESTful:
/cars?color=blue&type=sedan&doors=4
An advantage to regular querystrings is that they are standard and widely understood and that they can be generated from form-get.
The RESTful pretty URL design is about displaying a resource based on a structure (directory-like structure, date: articles/2005/5/13, object and it's attributes,..), the slash / indicates hierarchical structure, use the -id instead.
Hierarchical structure
I would personaly prefer:
/garage-id/cars/car-id
/cars/car-id #for cars not in garages
If a user removes the /car-id part, it brings the cars preview - intuitive. User exactly knows where in the tree he is, what is he looking at. He knows from the first look, that garages and cars are in relation. /car-id also denotes that it belongs together unlike /car/id.
Searching
The searchquery is OK as it is, there is only your preference, what should be taken into account. The funny part comes when joining searches (see below).
/cars?color=blue;type=sedan #most prefered by me
/cars;color-blue+doors-4+type-sedan #looks good when using car-id
/cars?color=blue&doors=4&type=sedan #also possible, but & blends in with text
Or basically anything what isn't a slash as explained above.
The formula: /cars[?;]color[=-:]blue[,;+&], though I wouldn't use the & sign as it is unrecognizable from the text at first glance if that's your thing.
** Did you know that passing JSON object in URI is RESTful? **
Lists of options
/cars?color=black,blue,red;doors=3,5;type=sedan #most prefered by me
/cars?color:black:blue:red;doors:3:5;type:sedan
/cars?color(black,blue,red);doors(3,5);type(sedan) #does not look bad at all
/cars?color:(black,blue,red);doors:(3,5);type:sedan #little difference
possible features?
Negate search strings (!)
To search any cars, but not black and red:
?color=!black,!red
color:(!black,!red)
Joined searches
Search red or blue or black cars with 3 doors in garages id 1..20 or 101..103 or 999 but not 5
/garage[id=1-20,101-103,999,!5]/cars[color=red,blue,black;doors=3]
You can then construct more complex search queries. (Look at CSS3 attribute matching for the idea of matching substrings. E.g. searching users containing "bar" user*=bar.)
Conclusion
Anyway, this might be the most important part for you, because you can do it however you like after all, just keep in mind that RESTful URI represents a structure which is easily understood e.g. directory-like /directory/file, /collection/node/item, dates /articles/{year}/{month}/{day}.. And when you omit any of last segments, you immediately know what you get.
So.., all these characters are allowed unencoded:
unreserved: a-zA-Z0-9_.-~
Typically allowed both encoded and not, both uses are then equivalent.
special characters: $-_.+!*'(),
reserved: ;/?:#=&
May be used unencoded for the purpose they represent, otherwise they must be encoded.
unsafe: <>"#%{}|^~[]`
Why unsafe and why should rather be encoded: RFC 1738 see 2.2
Also see RFC 1738#page-20 for more character classes.
RFC 3986 see 2.2
Despite of what I previously said, here is a common distinction of delimeters, meaning that some "are" more important than others.
generic delimeters: :/?#[]#
sub-delimeters: !$&'()*+,;=
More reading:
Hierarchy: see 2.3, see 1.2.3
url path parameter syntax
CSS3 attribute matching
IBM: RESTful Web services - The basics
Note: RFC 1738 was updated by RFC 3986
Although having the parameters in the path has some advantages, there are, IMO, some outweighing factors.
Not all characters needed for a search query are permitted in a URL. Most punctuation and Unicode characters would need to be URL encoded as a query string parameter. I'm wrestling with the same problem. I would like to use XPath in the URL, but not all XPath syntax is compatible with a URI path. So for simple paths, /cars/doors/driver/lock/combination would be appropriate to locate the 'combination' element in the driver's door XML document. But /car/doors[id='driver' and lock/combination='1234'] is not so friendly.
There is a difference between filtering a resource based on one of its attributes and specifying a resource.
For example, since
/cars/colors returns a list of all colors for all cars (the resource returned is a collection of color objects)
/cars/colors/red,blue,green would return a list of color objects that are red, blue or green, not a collection of cars.
To return cars, the path would be
/cars?color=red,blue,green or /cars/search?color=red,blue,green
Parameters in the path are more difficult to read because name/value pairs are not isolated from the rest of the path, which is not name/value pairs.
One last comment. I prefer /garages/yyy/cars (always plural) to /garage/yyy/cars (perhaps it was a typo in the original answer) because it avoids changing the path between singular and plural. For words with an added 's', the change is not so bad, but changing /person/yyy/friends to /people/yyy seems cumbersome.
To expand on Peter's answer - you could make Search a first-class resource:
POST /searches # create a new search
GET /searches # list all searches (admin)
GET /searches/{id} # show the results of a previously-run search
DELETE /searches/{id} # delete a search (admin)
The Search resource would have fields for color, make model, garaged status, etc and could be specified in XML, JSON, or any other format. Like the Car and Garage resource, you could restrict access to Searches based on authentication. Users who frequently run the same Searches can store them in their profiles so that they don't need to be re-created. The URLs will be short enough that in many cases they can be easily traded via email. These stored Searches can be the basis of custom RSS feeds, and so on.
There are many possibilities for using Searches when you think of them as resources.
The idea is explained in more detail in this Railscast.
Justin's answer is probably the way to go, although in some applications it might make sense to consider a particular search as a resource in its own right, such as if you want to support named saved searches:
/search/{searchQuery}
or
/search/{savedSearchName}
I use two approaches to implement searches.
1) Simplest case, to query associated elements, and for navigation.
/cars?q.garage.id.eq=1
This means, query cars that have garage ID equal to 1.
It is also possible to create more complex searches:
/cars?q.garage.street.eq=FirstStreet&q.color.ne=red&offset=300&max=100
Cars in all garages in FirstStreet that are not red (3rd page, 100 elements per page).
2) Complex queries are considered as regular resources that are created and can be recovered.
POST /searches => Create
GET /searches/1 => Recover search
GET /searches/1?offset=300&max=100 => pagination in search
The POST body for search creation is as follows:
{
"$class":"test.Car",
"$q":{
"$eq" : { "color" : "red" },
"garage" : {
"$ne" : { "street" : "FirstStreet" }
}
}
}
It is based in Grails (criteria DSL): http://grails.org/doc/2.4.3/ref/Domain%20Classes/createCriteria.html
This is not REST. You cannot define URIs for resources inside your API. Resource navigation must be hypertext-driven. It's fine if you want pretty URIs and heavy amounts of coupling, but just do not call it REST, because it directly violates the constraints of RESTful architecture.
See this article by the inventor of REST.
In addition i would also suggest:
/cars/search/all{?color,model,year}
/cars/search/by-parameters{?color,model,year}
/cars/search/by-vendor{?vendor}
Here, Search is considered as a child resource of Cars resource.
There are a lot of good options for your case here. Still you should considering using the POST body.
The query string is perfect for your example, but if you have something more complicated, e.g. an arbitrary long list of items or boolean conditionals, you might want to define the post as a document, that the client sends over POST.
This allows a more flexible description of the search, as well as avoids the Server URL length limit.
RESTful does not recommend using verbs in URL's /cars/search is not restful. The right way to filter/search/paginate your API's is through Query Parameters. However there might be cases when you have to break the norm. For example, if you are searching across multiple resources, then you have to use something like /search?q=query
You can go through http://saipraveenblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/rest-api-best-practices/ to understand the best practices for designing RESTful API's
Though I like Justin's response, I feel it more accurately represents a filter rather than a search. What if I want to know about cars with names that start with cam?
The way I see it, you could build it into the way you handle specific resources:
/cars/cam*
Or, you could simply add it into the filter:
/cars/doors/4/name/cam*/colors/red,blue,green
Personally, I prefer the latter, however I am by no means an expert on REST (having first heard of it only 2 or so weeks ago...)
My advice would be this:
/garages
Returns list of garages (think JSON array here)
/garages/yyy
Returns specific garage
/garage/yyy/cars
Returns list of cars in garage
/garages/cars
Returns list of all cars in all garages (may not be practical of course)
/cars
Returns list of all cars
/cars/xxx
Returns specific car
/cars/colors
Returns lists of all posible colors for cars
/cars/colors/red,blue,green
Returns list of cars of the specific colors (yes commas are allowed :) )
Edit:
/cars/colors/red,blue,green/doors/2
Returns list of all red,blue, and green cars with 2 doors.
/cars/type/hatchback,coupe/colors/red,blue,green/
Same idea as the above but a lil more intuitive.
/cars/colors/red,blue,green/doors/two-door,four-door
All cars that are red, blue, green and have either two or four doors.
Hopefully that gives you the idea. Essentially your Rest API should be easily discoverable and should enable you to browse through your data. Another advantage with using URLs and not query strings is that you are able to take advantage of the native caching mechanisms that exist on the web server for HTTP traffic.
Here's a link to a page describing the evils of query strings in REST: http://web.archive.org/web/20070815111413/http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?QueryStringsConsideredHarmful
I used Google's cache because the normal page wasn't working for me here's that link as well:
http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?QueryStringsConsideredHarmful