webfinger differences

webfinger-diff.txt

Differences between JRD and RDF data models:

1. Each document can have at most one subject per document.

2. Although the subject is optional in JRD, bnodes are not explicitly covered.

3. There are three named objects associated with a subject, links (analogous to predicate / URI pairs) and properties (analagous to predicate / literal pairs), aliases (much like owl : sameAs)


4. The literals are restricted to string and null (RDF uses the xsd types)



5. Each link relation can have a type attribute, which is a MIME type

6. Each link relation can have a "title" which provides internationalization e.g.:

     "titles" :
     {
       "en-us" : "The Magical World of Steve",
       "fr" : "Le Monde Magique de Steve"
     }

7. Each link relation can additionally have further properties which describe the link relation (similar to RDF reification)

8. The link relations are an ordered list, ordered by preference


9. The properties object can contain at most 1 of each predicate, the links object can have multiple predicates of the same type.  So for example if telephone number were a field you could have at most one telephone number literal.

10. The properties object will have a new registry maintained by IANA so that predicates can be literals


Note: similar functionality can be achieved via the well-known location void and sparql, but would involve another round trip.