January 10, 2007

Micro APIs

I wrote a rambling comment on Danny's Steampunk Semantics and I should explain more about what I am getting at. Or trying to get at :)

The way I see it, microformats offer an approach to serving metadata that is more accessible to developers - they weave the meta into the presentation of the data. The big trade-off is a lower level of specificity than required to reliably connect a local graph of data into a global fabric. In a world where there are linguists, lawyers, smart browsers, and automated data aggregators, this trade-off is very costly.

"It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is."
- Bill Clinton

While microformats do not have to be trapped into the same ambiguity as JSON API output (or your typical XML generated from XSD or a DTD), the first seeds of the microformats crystal indicate to me that the condition will continue. While it may be obvious - or feel obvious - to a web developer what Hcalendar's "summary" and "location" are referring to, I think that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard of succintness. If we do so, some amazing new applications will be able to emerge.

So somewhere in the midst of this idealism I thought up the Micro APIs concept. It really is just a play on words - it probably should be called a Meta API.

Basically, a Micro API would help small-time web developers disambiguate their application data (either through config file or through a GUI setup) and then serve the metadata in parallel with each content page. The metadata served by this lightweight app would take whatever format the browser or bot requested - JSON, plain XML, and different flavors of RDF. The Micro API could even pregenerate the metadata much like RSS currently is by the blog apps.

In Ruby, the Micro API would simply be a plugin with generators for models and controllers. Each model that can be used in serving metadata would have a method containing mappings of the model and its various properties to URIs on the semantic web.

And, ideally, web app frameworks such as Ruby on Rails will incorporate OWL into the process of generating models.