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Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration
Tracked Resource Set Specification Version 2.0

Status: WORKING DRAFT 2.0 Specification - February 27, 2013

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Creative Commons Attribution License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Notation and Conventions

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC2119. Domain name examples use RFC2606.

Introduction

The Tracked Resource Set protocol allows a server to expose a set of resources in a way that allows clients to discover the exact set of resources in the set, to track all additions to and removals from the set, and to track state changes to all resources in the set. The protocol does not assume that clients will dereference the resources. The protocol is suitable for dealing with large sets containing a large number of resources, as well as highly active resource sets that undergo continual change. The protocol is HTTP-based and follows RESTful principles.

Terminology

Resource Set - an enumerable, finite, collection of Resources

Resource - web resource identified by URI; the Resource Set members

Server - party playing the role of Resource Set provider

Client - party playing the role of consumer; interacts with a Server to enumerate and track Resources in the Server’s Resource Set

Tracked Resource Set (TRS) - describes the set of Resources in a Resource Set, expressed as a Base and a Change Log

Base - portion of a Tracked Resource Set representation that lists member Resources

Change Log - portion of a Tracked Resource Set representation detailing a series of Change Events

Change Event - describes the addition, removal, or state change of a member Resource

Overview

The Server maintains a Resource Set. A Resource Set consists of a finite, enumerable set of Resources. Each Resource is identified by a URI. The Server will have its own criteria for determining the exact set of member Resources at any point in time. However, clients need not be aware of the Server’s criteria, and will instead discover a Resource Set’s members by interacting with the Server using the Tracked Resource Set protocol.

The Server MUST provide an HTTP(S) URI corresponding to its Resource Set. This is referred to as the Tracked Resource Set URI. (Mechanisms for discovering Tracked Resource Set URIs is outside the scope of the Tracked Resource Set specification.)

A GET request sent to the Tracked Resource Set URI returns a representation of the state of the Resource Set characterized in terms of a Base and a Change Log: the Base provides a point-in-time enumeration of the members of the Resource Set, and the Change Log provides a time series of adjustments describing changes to members of the Resource Set. When the Base is empty, the Change Log describes a history of how the Resource Set has grown and evolved since its inception. When the Change Log is empty, the Base is a simple enumeration of the Resources in the Resource Set. This hybrid base+delta form gives the Server flexibility to structure the representation in ways that are most useful to its Clients.

The Base portion of a Tracked Resource Set representation is an RDF container where each member references a Resource that was in the Resource Set at the time the Base was computed. The Change Log portion is represented as an RDF collection, where the entries correspond to Change Events arranged in reverse chronological order. There must not be a gap between the Base portion and the Change Log portion of a Tracked Resource Set representation; however, the Change Log portion may contain earlier Change Event entries that would be accounted for by the Base portion. A “cutoff” property of the Base identifies the point in the Change Log at which processing of Change Events can be cut off because older changes are already covered by the Base portion.

Tracked Resource Set

An HTTP GET on a Tracked Resource Set URI returns a representation structured as follows (note: for exposition, the example snippets show the RDF information content using Turtle; the actual representation of these resources “on the wire” may vary):

Resource: http://cm1.example.com/trackedResourceSet

@prefix trs: http://open-services.net/ns/core/trs# .

http://cm1.example.com/trackedResourceSet a trs:TrackedResourceSet ; trs:base http://cm1.example.com/baseResources ; trs:changeLog [ a trs:ChangeLog ; trs:changes … . ] .

A Tracked Resource Set MUST provide references to the Base and Change Log using the trs:base and trs:changeLog predicates respectively.

A typical Client will periodically poll the Tracked Resource Set looking for recent Change Events. In order to cater to this usage, the Tracked Resource Set’s HTTP response MUST contain the triples for the referenced Change Log (i.e., via a Blank Node, or an inline named Resource). The Server SHOULD also support etags, caching, and conditional GETs for Tracked Resource Set resources and relegate the Base to separate resources.

Appendix A: Samples

(this section is informative)

See TrackedResourceSet 2.0 Samples

Appendix B: Resource Shapes

(this section is informative)

See TrackedResourceSet 2.0 Shapes

Appendix C: Notices and References

Contributors

Reporting Issues on the Specification

The working group participants who author and maintain this working draft specification, monitor a distribution list where issues or questions can be raised, see Core Mailing List

Also the issues found with this specification and their resolution can be found at @@@CoreV2Issues.

License and Intellectual Property

We make this specification available under the terms and conditions set forth in the site Terms of Use, IP Policy, and the Workgroup Participation Agreement for this Workgroup.

References

Appendix D: Changes

  • TBD

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