Towards a RESTful architecture for managing a global distributed interlinked data-content-information space

Abstract

The current debate around the future of the Internet has brought to front the concept of "Content-Centric" architecture, lying between the Web of Documents and the generalized Web of Data, in which explicit data are embedded in structured documents enabling the consistent support for the direct manipulation of information fragments. In this paper we present the InterDataNet (IDN) infrastructure technology designed to allow the RESTful management of interlinked information resources structured around documents. IDN deals with globally identified, addressable and reusable information fragments; it adopts an URI-based addressing scheme; it provides a simple, uniform Web-based interface to distributed heterogeneous information management; it endows information fragments with collaboration-oriented properties, namely: privacy, licensing, security, provenance, consistency, versioning and availability; it glues together reusable information fragments into meaningful structured and integrated documents without the need of a pre-defined schema. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.