The Link Type Resource (LTR) was originally created for the AM v 1.0 specification (that was never finalized, in favor of aligning with core 2.0). Its primary motivation was to provide a dynamic means for clients to obtain localized information about the types of link predicates that the service provider supported. On a more practical level this enabled service providers behind restrictive firewalls to use and leverage globally defined predicates in resources that would not otherwise be resolvable in the local environment. It also enable the addition of other information about the link types as permitted in the RDF model.
As the OSLC Core moves towards a more pure linked lifecycle data model, this resource type may no longer be necessary. In well defined ontologies all predicates should be directly resolvable. The resolution in RDF form should include some information about the predicate including rdfs:label and rdfs:comment.
Outstanding issues on deprecating this resource type include:
- default behavor for predicates that are not resolvable
- migration of AM 2.0 clients dependent on LTR
