RESTful coupling as the nature of the noosphere....
REST (REpresentation State Transfer) is a URI-centric architectural pattern for the web, featuring information nodes addressable through URLs, and request semantics fully expressible through HTTP GETs. This is contrasted with an API-centric approach (SOAP) which uses the web purely for transport, with its data unpacked by some language or application specific API behind the URL.
The difference may seem subtle, but it's significant: REST allows the language of the web to grow. Its semantics are within the ontology of the web, rather than within the ontology of some service behind the web. What this means is that the REST pattern can allow rich growth of meaningful links among web nodes: it can enrich the language of the web. You offer verbs with visible structure, somewhat like RNA, which guide the building of higher-level structures.
This is synergistic with Loose coupling as the way to go with growing the semantic web or the net of web services. You have nodes which expose services, or act as clients for services. Out of these you weave living info-ecologies. Not single monolithic applications, but information-husbandry patterns that you and your software can grow. This all needs common standards and use-patterns.
The key pieces seem to be:
- addressable nodes (such as purple numbers)
- metadata on the nodes (both embedded and layered on)
- metadata on the links
- persistence of nodes (you need to evaluate persistence-trustiness, and cache/archive if necessary)
- cascading ontologies (You always want to add your own metadata to that offered by some group or topic specific metadata management service).
Blogging with backlinks is an example of enriching through RESTful coupling: add your metadata on an inf (an information item, in RESTful space, that you're commenting on in your blog), which becomes part of that inf through its backlink to your blog. It works both ways: the weblog item points to and enriches an inf, and the infs pointing to the weblog item enrich it. Cory Doctorow has a nice discussion of this in My Blog, My Outboard Brain .
4:41:06 PM 
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