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Deploying Linked Data - TOC Section Contents: Deploying Linked Data - Part 2 Deploying Linked Data using Virtuoso The Virtuoso Rule-Based URL Rewriter Conductor UI for the URL Rewriter Virtual Domains (Hosts) & Directories "Nice" URLs vs. "Long" URLs Rule Processing Mechanics Enabling URL Rewriting via the Virtuoso Conductor UI Northwind Demonstration Database Configuring Rewrite Rules using Conductor Dissection of Northwind Rewrite Rules Configured using Conductor Regex Rule for RDF Requests Constructing the Destination Path Format Data Flow in Conductor-Defined Northwind RDF Regex Rule Regex Rule for HTML Requests Enabling URL Rewriting via Virtuoso PL Exporting Rewrite Rules from Conductor Defining Virtual Hosts in Virtuoso PL URL Rewriting Configuration API

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Creating Rewrite Rules URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE Dissection of Northwind Rewrite Rules Configured using Virtuoso PL Data Flow in Virtuoso/PL-Defined Northwind RDF Regex Rule Northwind URL Rewriting Verification Using cURL Browsing & Exploring the Northwind RDF View Interacting with Linked Data via ODE Interacting with Linked Data via iSPARQL Transparent Content Negotiation HTTP/1.1 Content Negotiation Transparent Content Negotiation Deficiencies of HTTP/1.1 Server-Driven Negotiation Variant Selection By User Agent Variant Selection By Server Variant Selection By End-User Transparent Content Negotiation in Virtuoso HTTP Server Describing Resource Variants HTTP_VARIANT_MAP Table Configuration using Virtuoso/PL Configuration using Conductor UI Variant Selection Algorithm Transparent Content Negotiation Examples Simple TCN with Static Content Northwind RDF View DBpedia Simplifying Deployment with RDFa No Content Negotiation or 303 Redirects Generating RDFa Dynamically Using Description.vsp RDFa Output From Non-RDF Data Sources

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Sample RDFa Output From Description.vsp

The preceding sections described a generic approach to deploying Linked Data into the existing Web. We now turn our attention to Virtuoso, to describe its solution for Linked Data deployment. In fact, Virtuoso's solution is to implement the generic approach outlined in the prior sections, using the twin pillars of content negotiation and URL rewriting.

Virtuoso provides a URL rewriter that can be enabled for URLs matching specified patterns. Coupled with customizable HTTP response headers and response codes, Linked Data Web server administrators can configure highly flexible rules for driving content negotiation and URL rewriting. The key elements of the URL rewriter are: Rewrite rule Each rule describes how to parse a single source URL, and how to compose the URL of the page ultimately returned in the "Location:" response headers Every rewrite rule is uniquely identified internally (using IRIs). Two types of rule are supported, based on the syntax used to describe the source URL pattern matching - sprintf-based and regex-based. Rewrite rule list A named ordered-list of rewrite rules or rule lists

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where rules of the list are processed from top to bottom or in line with processing pipeline precedence instructions Configuration API Defines functions for creating, dropping, and enumerating rules and rule lists. Virtual hosts and virtual paths URL rewriting is enabled by associating a rewrite rules list with a virtual directory Each of these elements is described in more detail below, although complete descriptions of the features or functions in question are not given. The intention here is to provide an overview of Virtuoso's URL rewriting capabilities and their application to deploying Linked Data. Please refer to the Virtuoso Reference Documentation for full details.

Virtuoso is a full-blown HTTP server in its own right. The HTTP server functionality co-exists with the product core (i.e. DBMS Engine, Web Services Platform, WebDAV filesystem, and other components of the Universal Server). As a result, it has the ability to multi-home Web domains within a single instance across a variety of domain name and port combinations. In addition, it also enables the creation of multiple virtual directories per domain. In addition to the basic functionality describe above, Virtuoso lets you associate URL rewrite rules with the virtual directories associated with a particular hosted Web domain. In all cases, Virtuoso enables you to configure virtual domains, virtual directories and URL rewrite rules for one or more virtual directories, via the (X)HTML-based Conductor Admin User Interface or a collection of Virtuoso Stored

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Procedure Language (PL)-based APIs.

A Virtuoso virtual directory maps a logical path to a physical directory in your file system or WebDAV repository. This mechanism allows physical locations to be hidden or simply reorganised. Virtual directory definitions are held in the system table DB.DBA.HTTP_PATH. Virtual directories can be administered in three basic ways: Using the Visual Administration Interface via a Web browser; Using the functions vhost_define() and
vhost_remove(); and

Using SQL statements to directly update the

HTTP_PATH system table.

Although we are approaching the URL Rewriter from the perspective of deploying Linked Data, the rewriter was developed with additional objectives in mind. These in turn have influenced the naming of some of the formal argument names in the Configuration API function prototypes. In the following sections, "long" URLs are those containing a query string with named parameters; "nice" (also known as "source") URLs have data encoded in some other format. The primary goal of the Rewriter was to accept a nice URL from an application and convert this into a long URL, which then identifies the page that should actually be retrieved.

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When an HTTP request is accepted by the Virtuoso HTTP server, the received nice URL is passed to an internal path translation function. This function takes the nice URL and, if the current virtual directory has a url_rewrite option set to an existing rule list name, tries to match the corresponding rule lists and rules; that is, the function performs a recursive traversal of any rule list associated with the virtual directory. For every rule in the rule list, the same logic is applied (only the logic for regex-based rules is described; that for sprintf-based rules is very similar): The input for the rule is the resource URL as received from the HTTP header, i.e., the portion of the URL from the first '/' after the host:port fields to the end of the URL. The input is normalized. The input is matched against the rule's regex. If the match fails, the rule is not applied and the next rule is tried. If the match succeeds, the result is a vector of values. If the URL contains a query string, the names and values of the parameters are decoded by
split_and_decode().

The names and values of any parameters in the request body are also decoded. The destination URL is composed. The value of each parameter in the destination URL is taken from (in order of priority): the value of a parameter in the match result; the value of a named parameter in the query string of the input nice URL; if the original request was submitted by the
POST method, the value of a named

parameter in the body of the POST request; or

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if a parameter value cannot be derived from one of these sources, the rule is not applied and the next rule is tried. Note:The path translation function described above is internal to the Web server, so its signature is not appropriate for Virtuoso/PL calls and thus is not published. Virtuoso/PL developers can harness the same functionality using the
DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_APPLY API call.

The URL rewriting examples which follow are taken from the Virtuoso Northwind demonstration database, which is included in the Demo VAD (Virtuoso Application Distribution) archive.

To check which version of the Demo VAD is installed, or to upgrade it, refer to the Conductor's 'VAD Packages' screen, reachable through the 'System Admin' > 'Packages' menu items. The latest VADs for the closed source releases of Virtuoso can be downloaded from the downloads area of the OpenLink website. Select either the 'DBMS (WebDAV) Hosted' or 'File System Hosted' product format from the 'Distributed Collaborative Applications' section, depending on whether you want the Virtuoso application to be run from WebDAV or native filesystem storage. VADs for Virtuoso Open Source edition (VOS) are available for download from the VOS Wiki.

Northwind Demonstration Database

The Virtuoso Northwind database (contained in the "Demo"

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catalog) is very similar to the Northwind example database available for SQL Server. Its schema comprises commonly understood SQL tables that include: Customers, Orders,
Employees, Products, Product Categories, Shippers, Countries, Provinces, etc.

Northwind is installed with a preconfigured RDF view and a set of preconfigured URL rewrite rules that collectively expose RDF based entity graphs and URLs of (X)HTML web pages that describe the back-end relational data. An RDF View over relational data is a named collection (graph) of RDF records (triples) derived from an RDBMSto-RDF source data map exposed via a Virtuoso Quad Store. The process of declaring RDF Views over RDBMS data using the Virtuoso Meta-schema Language is described in detail in our RDF Views of SQL white paper. To view the Northwind entity graph in RDF format, starting with the entity "ALFKI", simply place the following document URL into the OpenLink Data Explorer :

http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind/Customer/ALFKI

Alternatively, you can view an (X)HTML based description of the entity "ALFKI" by pointing your Web browser to the same URL. (The details of these URLs will be explained shortly; for now they are presented purely as pointers to illustrate example data available from Northwind.)

Configuring Rewrite Rules using Conductor

The steps for configuring URL Rewrite rules via the Virtuoso Conductor are as follows: 1. Click to the "Web Application Server" > "Virtual Domains & Directories" tabs.

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Conductor's Hosted Domains and Virtual Directories screen

2. Pick the domain that contains the virtual directories to which the rules are to be applied (in this case the default was taken).

Accessing the URL rewrite rules for the Northwind demo database

3. Click on the "URL-rewrite" link to create, delete, or edit a rule as shown below. 4. Create a rule for HTML based representations of resource description requests.

Northwind URL rewrite rule for HTML requests

5. Create a rule for N3 or RDF/XML based representations

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or resource descriptions.

Northwind URL rewrite rule for RDF requests

6. Save your rules, exit the Conductor, and test your rules with "cURL" or any other HTTP-based user agent.

Dissection of Northwind Rewrite Rules Configured using Conductor

The screenshots above show the default Northwind rewrite rules. Let's analyze what they are doing.

Regex Rule for RDF Requests

The regex rule for handling RDF/XML or N3 representation requests specifies a 'Request Path Pattern' of (/[^#]*) . Recall that the input path is the portion of the input URL from the first '/' after the host:port fields to the end of the normalized URL. So, given a request for
http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind/Customer /ALFKI, the request path pattern would match /Northwind /Customer/ALFKI. Parentheses in the pattern collect the

results of the pattern matching into parameters. Each successive pair of parentheses denotes a parameter, referred to elsewhere in the rewrite rule as $U1, $U2, $U3, ..., or
$s1, $s2, $s3, ..., etc. These parameters can then be

used to substitute a part of the input path that was matched into the new URL being composed. The parameter markers

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$U1 and $s1 (likewise $U2 and $s2 etc.) identify the same

pattern segment in the request path pattern. The only difference between them is how the matched text is encoded when it is inserted into the new URL. The 's' format specifier inserts the matched text as is, whereas the 'U' format specifier causes the inserted text to be URL encoded. Content types specified in the request's Accept header and matched by the 'Accept Header Request Pattern' are available for substitution into the rewritten URL through the
$accept variable.

Rather than hardcoding host names and ports, the rules are made more generic by using the convenience macro
URIQADefaultHost. Every occurrence of ^{URIQADefaultHost}^ will be substituted with the value

of the DefaultHost parameter defined in the URIQA section of the Virtuoso configuration file, virtuoso.ini. "DefaultHost" is the "canonical" server name that is used to identify the service. It should be either a server host name including domain (i.e. an FQDN), or an IP address in standard notation. If Virtuoso's default HTTP port is not equal to 80 then the port should also be included, e.g. "www.example.com:8890".

Constructing the Destination Path Format

The parameter markers, variables and macros just described provide the building blocks for constructing the 'Destination Path Format' which serves as a template for the rewritten URL. It must be stressed that it is not necessary to URL-encode the Destination Path Format by hand. You need only write the underlying CONSTRUCT or DESCRIBE SPARQL query. When defining a new Destination Path Format, click on the SPARQL button to enable a text box (shown below) into which you can enter the base SPARQL

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query which will describe the entity being dereferenced. On clicking the 'Format' button to return, the SPARQL query will be expanded into a full query string, including a result-set format-specifier, and URL-encoded automatically. For example, the base query:

DESCRIBE <http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^$U1#this> <http

becomes:

/sparql?query=DESCRIBE+%3Chttp%3A//^{URIQADefaultHos

The pre-configured DESCRIBE query for Northwind describes two entities: http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^/Northwind/Customer /ALFKI#this and http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^/Northwind/Customer/ALFKI http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^/Northwind/Customer /ALFKI identifies a document (an entity of type foaf:Document) that has the entity http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^ /Northwind/Customer/ALFKI#this as its foaf:PrimaryTopic property value. This relationship is the key to using the description of the document (a report) about "ALFKI" to expose the deeper entity graph that describes the entity "ALFKI#this".

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Defining the SPARQL query for the Northwind RDF requests

Data Flow in Conductor-Defined Northwind RDF Regex Rule

The process of rewriting a request for an RDF representation of Northwind customer ALFKI, through the corresponding regex rule, is depicted below as a data flow diagram. The arcs connecting similarly-colored items attempt to illustrate how portions of the input request are matched and substituted into the rewritten request.

Breakdown of the URL rewriting process for Northwind RDF requests

Regex Rule for HTML Requests

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The Northwind regex rule for HTML requests functions in a similar way to the regex rule for RDF requests. That is, the mechanisms for pattern matching and parameter substitution are the same. The only differences are the content types matched and the target URL. In this case, the destination path format is:

/about/html/http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^$s1

Here, the path /about/html/ redirects the client to the Virtuoso Sponger proxy interface. The Sponger itself is a highly customizable RDFizer. Virtuoso reserves two paths for the proxy service, '/about/rdf/' and '/about/html/'. (Note: These proxy paths have since been augmented to support a richer slash URI scheme for identifying format variants. Please refer to Appendix B for more details.) The web service takes the target URL following the proxy path and either returns the content "as is" or tries to transform it to RDF. The RDF graph derived from the sponging process is then rendered in one of the RDF serialization formats (RDF/XML or N3) or HTML depending on whether the request specified /about/rdf/ or /about/html/. Thus, the proxy service can be used as a middleware for enabling RDF based exploration of non-RDF sources using dedicated RDF browsers or standard (X)HTML browsers. The mechanism through which Virtuoso composes an HTML rendering of RDF data (whether this be a native RDF description, or one extracted by the Sponger) is via the "description.vsp" rendering template, a specialized Virtuoso Server Page specifically aimed at RDF-model-based resource description. The "description.vsp" template is described in more detail in Appendix A. A usage example covering the description of the entity

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<http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind/Customer /ALFKI#this> is shown below.

description.vsp HTML rendering of Customer entity ALFKI

While the Conductor UI provides the easiest way to set up URL rewriting, on occasion it may be preferable to configure URL rewriting programmatically using Virtuoso PL.

Exporting Rewrite Rules from Conductor

The Conductor lets you export configured rules as Virtuoso PL, making it easier to use them on another system, for instance. The exported script recreates the rewrite rules using Virtuoso's URL Rewriting Configuration API.

Conductor's 'Export' button for exporting URL

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rewrite rules

The code listing below shows the exported Northwind rules. Describing the Configuration API and this exported rules file forms the focus of this section.

DB.DBA.VHOST_REMOVE ( lhost=>'*ini*', vhost=>'*ini*' DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE ( lhost=>'*ini*', vhost=>'*ini*' ppath=>'/DAV/home/demo/', is_dav=>1, vsp_user=>'db vector ('url_rewrite', 'demo_nw_rule_list1'), is_d DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_RULELIST ( 'demo_nw_rule_li DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'demo_nw_rule1 '/about/html/http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^%s', vecto DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'demo_nw_rule2 '/sparql?query=DESCRIBE+%%3Chttp%%3A//^{URIQADefau vector ('path', 'path', '*accept*'), NULL, '(text/

Exporting Rewrite Rules from a Script Use the function DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_DUMP_RULELIST_SQL to export rule lists programmatically. e.g. From isql, you can generate the listing shown above by executing: SELECT DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_DUMP_RULELIST_SQL('demo_nw_rule_list1')

Defining Virtual Hosts in Virtuoso PL

As can be seen above, the vhost_define() API call is used to define virtual hosts and virtual paths hosted by the Virtuoso HTTP server. URL rewriting is enabled through this function's opts parameter. opts is of type ANY, e.g. a vector of field-value pairs. Numerous fields are recognized for controlling different options. The field value url_rewrite controls URL rewriting. The corresponding field value is the IRI of a rule list to apply.

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URL Rewriting Configuration API

Virtuoso includes the following functions for managing URL rewrite rules and rule lists. The names are self-explanatory.
DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_DROP_RULE - Deletes a rewrite

rule.
DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_SPRINTF_RULE -

Creates a rewrite rule which uses sprintf-based pattern matching.

DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE - Creates

a rewrite rule which uses regular expression (regex)-based pattern matching.

DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_DROP_RULELIST - Deletes a

rewrite rule list.

DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_RULELIST - Creates a

rewrite rule list.

DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_ENUMERATE_RULES - Lists all

the rules whose IRIs match the specified 'SQL like' pattern.
DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_ENUMERATE_RULELISTS - Lists

all the rule lists whose IRIs match the specified 'SQL like' pattern.

Creating Rewrite Rules

Rewrite rules take two forms: sprintf-based or regex-based. When used for nice URL to long URL conversion, the only difference between them is the syntax of format strings. The reverse long to nice conversion works only for sprintf-based rules, whereas regex-based rules are unidirectional. For the purpose of describing how to make dereferenceable URIs for Linked Data, we will focus on regex-based rules. Regex rules are created using the

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URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE() function.

URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE

Function Prototype:

URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( rule_iri, allow_update, nice_match, nice_params, n target_compose, target_params, target_expn := null do_not_continue := 0, http_redirect_code := null,

Parameters: rule_iri : VARCHAR The rule's name / identifier

allow_update : INTEGER

Indicates whether the rule can be updated. 1 indicates yes; 0 indicates no. The update is subject to the following rules: If the given rule_iri is already in use as a rule list identifier, an error is signalled. If the given rule_iri is already in use as a rule identifier and allow_update for the existing rule is zero, an error is signalled. If the given rule_iri is already in use as a rule identifier and allow_update for the existing rule is non-zero, the existing rule is updated.
nice_match : VARCHAR

A regex match expression to parse the URL into a vector of occurrences.

nice_params : ANY

A vector of the names of the parsed parameters. The length of the vector should be equal to the number of '(...)' specifiers in the format string.

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nice_min_params : INTEGER

Used to specify the minimum number of sprintf format patterns to be matched in order to trigger the given rule. It only affects sprintf rules and has no effect for regex rules.
target_compose : VARCHAR

A regex compose expression for the URL of the destination page.

target_params : ANY

A vector of names of parameters that should be passed to the compose expression (target_compose) as $1,
$2 and so on. target_expn : VARCHAR

Optional SQL text that should be executed instead of a regex compose call.
accept_pattern : VARCHAR

A regex expression to match the HTTP Accept header

do_not_continue : INTEGER

If the given rule satisfies the match conditions, 1 signifies do not try the next rule from same rule list, and
0 signifies try the next rule. http_redirect_code : INTEGER NULL or the integer values 301, 302, 303, or 406, are

currently allowed. If a 3xx redirect code is given, an HTTP redirect response will be sent back to client. If
NULL is specified, the server will process the redirect

internally.

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http_headers : VARCHAR

HTTP headers to supply with the rewritten request.

Dissection of Northwind Rewrite Rules Configured using Virtuoso PL

Having briefly outlined the URL Rewriting API, we return now to the Northwind rule configuration script listed earlier. At the start of the script, we define a virtual directory in order to turn on URL rewriting through vhost_define(). We first remove any existing definition for logical path /Northwind on the virtual host defined by vhost, before redefining the logical path. vhost specifies the host name sent to a user-agent in an HTTP response. This must be a valid fullyqualified host name or alias and port separated by ':'. This parameter accepts the special value '*ini*' which will be replaced with the hostname and port configured in the
virtuoso.ini file.

The /Northwind virtual directory is mapped to a DAV folder (indicated by is_dav being non-zero) whose physical path is
/DAV/home/demo. The machine hosting the virtual directory

listens on the IP address and port specified by lhost (i.e., listen host). Like vhost, this accepts the special value '*ini*'. Any VSP pages contained in the virtual directory will run as user 'dba'. URL rewriting is enabled through the url_rewrite field in the opts vector; the URL rewriter will use the rule list named
demo_nw_rule_list1. The latter is defined by the URLREWRITE_CREATE_RULELIST function call which follows.

The rule list contains two regex-based rules,

demo_nw_rule1 and demo_nw_rule2, each defined by calls

to function URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE.

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Consider first rule demo_nw_rule2. In this rule, the regular expression '(/[^#]*)' specified for nice_match matches the input IRI up to fragment delimiter (#). The corresponding occurrence is named 'path' in the nice_params vector. The client must be requesting the return data as RDF serialized as N3 or RDF/XML in order for the rule to apply. Argument target_compose specifies a URL-encoded template for the rewritten destination URL. Spaces are encoded as '+' or '%20', the reserved character '#' is percentencoded as '%23' and the '%' character itself is escaped by '%'. Removing the URL encoding and the final format specifier ('&format=%U'), the SPARQL DESCRIBE query being built takes the form:
DESCRIBE <http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^%U#this> <http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^%U> FROM <http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^/Northwind>

Unsurprisingly this is almost identical to the SPARQL query displayed by Conductor, when the same rewrite rules are viewed through the Conductor UI. The only difference lies in the slightly different syntax used for parameter markers (%U or %s, as opposed to $U1, $U2, ... or $s1, $s2, ... in Conductor). Here, the two sprintf-like format characters %U are placeholders which receive the first two entries in the
target_params vector, i.e., the value of 'path'. In our

example, the value of 'path' would be '/Northwind

/Customer/ALFKI'.

The query response format is controlled by the format query parameter. In the format specifier ('&format=%U') at the end of the constructed query string, the third placeholder '%U' receives the value of the third entry in the target_params vector, '*accept*'. The '*accept*' parameter is used to

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pass the part of Accept header matched against

accept_pattern, e.g. if the Accept header specified MIME

types of 'application/rdf+xml, application/xml' and the accept_pattern is '(text/rdf.n3)|(application

/rdf.xml)', then the '*accept*' parameter will have the

value of 'application/rdf+xml'. The other rule, demo_nw_rule1, is essentially similar, but targeted at HTML browsers rather than RDF browsers. Rather than the internal redirect used by demo_nw_rule2, this rule returns HTTP redirect code 303 to the client when the rewrite rule is applied.

Internal Rewrites vs External Redirects External redirect: Tells the client to ask for the requested content again using a new URL and HTTP request. An external redirect is indicated by one of the HTTP response codes: 301 - Moved permanently (for permanent redirection)302 Found (the most common way of performing a redirection)303 - See Other (the correct manner in which to redirect web applications to a new URI) Internal rewrite/redirect: Gets the content for the requested URL from a different server file path than implied by the requested URL.

As described earlier when examining the Conductorconfigured rules, HTML requests are redirected to
description.vsp via the Sponger proxy interface.

System Tables Supporting URL Rewriting If you need to check your rewrite rule definitions, an alternative to inspecting them using Conductor is to query Virtuoso's system tables directly. The relevant system tables for URL rewriting are

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DB.DBA.URL_REWRITE_RULE_LIST and DB.DBA.URL_REWRITE_RULE. For example, the configured rule lists can be seen by executing 'SELECT URRL_LIST FROM DB.DBA.URL_REWRITE_RULE_LIST'

Data Flow in Virtuoso/PL-Defined Northwind RDF Regex Rule

Earlier we presented a data flow diagram showing the process of rewriting a request for an RDF representation of Northwind customer ALFKI, through a regex rule defined in the Conductor. Below is a similar diagram, depicting the same request rewrite, this time using the Virtuoso PL definition of the same rule. As before, the arcs connecting similarly coloured items illustrate how portions of the input request are matched and substituted into the rewritten request.

Breakdown of the URL rewriting process for Northwind RDF requests

As illustrated earlier, the curl utility provides a useful tool for

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verifying HTTP server responses and rewrite rules. The first two curl exchanges below show the default Northwind URL rewrite rules being applied. Example 1:

$ curl -I -H "Accept: text/html" http://demo.openlin HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.09.3037 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1Date: Fri Accept-Ranges: bytes Location: http://demo.openlinksw.com/about/html/http Content-Length: 0

Example 2:

$ curl -I -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://de HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Virtuoso/05.09.3037 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: Keep-Alive Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:14:49 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Type: application/rdf+xml; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 9488

Example 3:

$ curl -I -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://de HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.09.3037 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:23:31 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Location: http://demo.openlinksw.com/sparql?query=DE Content-Length: 0

The third example shows the response generated when the default rule for RDF requests is changed to return an HTTP response code of 303, rather than use an internal redirect. Making this temporary change allows the generated SPARQL

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query to be viewed and checked with curl.

In this section, we are going to interact with Linked Data deployed into the Linked Data Web from a live instance of Virtuoso, which uses the URL Rewrite rules from the prior section. The components used in the example are as follows: Virtuoso SPARQL Endpoint http://demo.openlinksw.com/sparql Named RDF Graph - http://demo.openlinksw.com /Northwind Entity ID - http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind /Customer/ALFKI#this Information Resource - http://demo.openlinksw.com /Northwind/Customer/ALFKI Interactive SPARQL Query Builder (iSPARQL) http://demo.openlinksw.com/DAV/JS/isparql/index.html

Steps: 1. Point your HTML browser to the URI http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind/Customer/ALFKI to display the HTML rendering of the RDF container document pointing to entity ALFKI. Click on the link http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind/Customer /ALFKI#this adjacent to the foaf:PrimaryTopic property to display the ALFKI entity itself.

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2. Ctrl-Click (OS/X) or right-click (Windows) on the 'About: Alfreds Futterkiste' link at the top of the page to display the ODE pop-up menu then click on the 'View Linked Data Sources' command. This launches the ODE RDF browser which will present an RDF Linked Data view of customer ALFKI. 3. Click on one of ALFKI's attribute values, for instance one of the customer's orders, to display a pop-up with options for 'expanding' the URI. Selecting 'Describe' dereferences the attribute value URI, to display details of the selected order.

The screenshot below shows the result of dereferencing the data link http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind /Order/11103#this. (Triples associated with the 'Alfreds Futterkiste' entity were removed beforehand for clarity, by clicking the 'Remove' link in the 'Cache' group box,

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to show only the Order details.)

Continuing in this way, one can navigate over the Northwind RDF graph, drilling down to uncover more details of selected entities.

We can interact with the same Information Resource and associated RDF using the iSPARQL Query tool as follows: 1. Start the Query Builder by entering the following into your browser: http://demo.openlinksw.com/isparql You will be presented with a default Query By Example (QBE) canvas that includes a default Graph Pattern and a default URI. Change the URI to the Northwind graph URI: http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind .

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2. Then execute the default query (which simply gets a list of concepts defined by the RDF graph), by clicking on the ">" button.

3. Click on the Customer record, and you will be presented with a Linked-Data-Web-optimized hyperlink that presents you with three options: Get Data Items, Describe Data Source, and Open Web Page. 4. Click Get Data Items (since you are interested in "instance data" for the Customer concept, as opposed to the schema definitions of said concept). You will be presented a list of northwind:Customer instances. Click on the 's' column header to sort the customer list alphabetically.

5. Click on the http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind

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/Customer/ALFKI record, and you will once again be presented with the enhanced hyperlink and its options. Again click on Get Data Items, to get all the records in the RDF database related to entity http://demo.openlinksw.com/Northwind/Customer/ALFKI .

So as not to overload our preceding description of Linked Data deployment with excessive detail, the description of content negotiation presented thus far was kept deliberately brief. This section discusses content negotiation in more detail.

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Recall that a resource (conceptual entity) identified by a URI may be associated with more than one representation (e.g. multiple languages, data formats, sizes, resolutions). If multiple representations are available, the resource is referred to as negotiable and each of its representations is termed a variant. For instance, a Web document resource, named 'ALFKI' may have three variants: alfki.xml, alfki.html and alfki.txt all representing the same data. Content negotiation provides a mechanism for selecting the best variant. As outlined in the earlier brief discussion of content negotiation, when a user agent requests a resource, it can include with the request Accept headers (Accept, AcceptLanguage, Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding etc.) which express the user preferences and user agent capabilities. The server then chooses and returns the best variant based on the Accept headers. Because the selection of the best resource representation is made by the server, this scheme is classed as server-driven negotiation.

An alternative content negotiation mechanism is Transparent Content Negotiation (TCN), a protocol defined by RFC2295 . TCN offers a number of benefits over standard HTTP/1.1 negotiation, for suitably enabled user agents. RFC2295 introduces a number of new HTTP headers including the Negotiate request header, and the TCN and Alternates response headers. (Krishnamurthy et al. note that although the HTTP/1.1 specification reserved the Alternates

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header for use in agent driven negotiation, it was not fully specified. Consequently under a pure HTTP/1.1 implementation as defined by RFC2616, server-driven content negotiation is the only option. RFC2295 addresses this issue.)

Deficiencies of HTTP/1.1 Server-Driven Negotiation

Weaknesses of server-driven negotiation highlighted by RFCs 2295 and 2616 include: Inefficiency - Sending details of a user agent's capabilities and preferences with every request is very inefficient, not least because very few Web resources have multiple variants, and expensive in terms of the number of Accept headers required to fully describe all but the most simple browser's capabilities. Server doesn't always know 'best' - Having the server decide on the 'best' variant may not always result in the most suitable resource representation being returned to the client. The user agent might often be better placed to decide what is best for its needs.

Variant Selection By User Agent

Rather than rely on server-driven negotiation and variant selection by the server, a user agent can take full control over deciding the best variant by explicitly requesting transparent content negotiation through the Negotiate request header. The negotiation is 'transparent' because it makes all the variants on the server visible to the agent. Under this scheme, the server sends the user agent a list, represented in an Alternates header, containing the available variants and their properties. The user agent can then choose

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the best variant itself. Consequently, the agent no longer needs to send large Accept headers describing in detail its capabilities and preferences. (However, unless caching is used, user-agent driven negotiation does suffer from the disadvantage of needing a second request to obtain the best representation. By sending its best guess as the first response, server driven negotiation avoids this second request if the initial best guess is acceptable.)

Variant Selection By Server

As well as variant selection by the user agent, TCN allows the server to choose on behalf of the user agent if the user agent explicitly allows it through the Negotiate request header. This option allows the user agent to send smaller Accept headers containing enough information to allow the server to choose the best variant and return it directly. The server's choice is controlled by a 'remote variant selection algorithm' as defined in RFC2296.

Variant Selection By End-User

A further option is to allow the end-user to select a variant, in case the choice made by negotiation process is not optimal. For instance, the user agent could display an HTML-based 'pick list' of variants constructed from the variant list returned by the server. Alternatively the server could generate this pick list itself and include it in the response to a user agent's request for a variant list. (Virtuoso currently responds this way.)

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The following section describes the Virtuoso HTTP server's TCN implementation which is based on RFC2295, but without "Feature" negotiation. OpenLink's RDF rich clients, iSparql and the OpenLink RDF Browser, both support TCN. User agents which do not support transparent content negotiation continue to be handled using HTTP/1.1 style content negotiation (whereby server-side selection is the only option the server selects the best variant and returns a list of variants in an Alternates response header).

In order to negotiate a resource, the server needs to be given information about each of the variants. Variant descriptions are held in SQL table HTTP_VARIANT_MAP. The descriptions themselves can be created, updated or deleted using Virtuoso/PL or through the Conductor UI.

HTTP_VARIANT_MAP Table
The table definition is as follows:

create table DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_MAP ( VM_ID integer identity, -- unique ID VM_RULELIST varchar, -- HTTP rule list name VM_URI varchar, -- name of requested r VM_VARIANT_URI varchar, -- name of variant e.g VM_QS float, -- Source quality, a n VM_TYPE varchar, -- Content type of the VM_LANG varchar, -- Content language e. VM_ENC varchar, -- Content encoding e. VM_DESCRIPTION long varchar, -- a human readable de VM_ALGO int default 0, -- reserved for future primary key (VM_RULELIST, VM_URI, VM_VARIANT_URI) ); create unique index HTTP_VARIANT_MAP_ID on DB.DBA.HT

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Configuration using Virtuoso/PL

Two functions are provided for adding or updating, or removing variant descriptions using Virtuoso/PL: Adding or Updating a Resource Variant

DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD ( in rulelist_uri varchar, -- HTTP rule list na in uri varchar, -- Requested resourc in variant_uri varchar, -- Variant name e.g. in mime varchar, -- Content type of t in qs float := 1.0, -- Source quality, a in description varchar := null, -- a human readable in lang varchar := null, -- Content language in enc varchar := null -- Content encoding )

Removing a Resource Variant

DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_REMOVE ( in rulelist_uri varchar, in uri varchar, in variant_uri varchar := '%' )

-- HTTP rule list nam -- Name of requested -- Variant name filte

Configuration using Conductor UI

The Conductor 'Content negotiation' panel for describing resource variants and configuring content negotiation is depicted below. It can be reached by selecting the 'Virtual Domains & Directories' tab under the 'Web Application Server' menu item, then selecting the 'URL rewrite' option for a logical path listed amongst those for the relevant HTTP host, e.g. '{Default Web Site}'. The screen snapshot shows the variant descriptions created by issuing the HTTP_VARIANT_ADD and VHOST_DEFINE Virtuoso/PL calls detailed in the examples at the end of this

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section. Obviously these definitions could instead have been created entirely 'from scratch' through the Conductor UI. The input fields reflect the supported 'dimensions' of negotiation which include content type, language and encoding. Quality values corresponding to the options for 'Source Quality' are as follows:

Source Quality perfect representation threshold of noticeable loss of quality

Quality Value 1.000 0.900

noticeable, but acceptable quality reduction 0.800 barely acceptable quality severely degraded quality completely degraded quality 0.500 0.300 0.000

Content negotiation rules in Conductor

When a user agent instructs the server to select the best variant, Virtuoso does so using the selection algorithm below: If a virtual directory has URL rewriting enabled (has the 'url_rewrite' option set), the web server:

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1. Looks in DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_MAP for a VM_RULELIST matching the one specified in the 'url_rewrite' option 2. If present, it loops over all variants for which VM_URI is equal to the resource requested 3. For every variant it calculates the source quality based on the value of VM_QS and the source quality given by the user agent 4. If the best variant is found, it adds TCN HTTP headers to the response and passes the VM_VARIANT_URI to the URL rewriter 5. If the user agent has asked for a variant list, it composes such a list and returns an 'Alternates' HTTP header with response code 300 6. If no URL rewriter rules exist for the target URL, the web server returns the content of the dereferenced VM_VARIANT_URI. The server may return the best-choice resource representation or a list of available resource variants. When a user agent requests transparent negotiation, the web server returns the TCN header "choice". When a user agent asks for a variant list, the server returns the TCN header "list".

In this example we assume the following files have been uploaded to the Virtuoso WebDAV server, with each containing the same information but in different formats:

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/DAV/TCN/page.xml - a XML variant /DAV/TCN/page.html - a HTML variant /DAV/TCN/page.txt - a text variant We add TCN rules and define a virtual directory:

DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD ('http_rule_list_1', 'page', DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD ('http_rule_list_1', 'page', DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD ('http_rule_list_1', 'page', DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE (lpath=>'/DAV/TCN/', ppath=>'/DA opts=>vector ('url_rewrite', 'h

Having done this we can now test the setup with a suitable HTTP client, in this case the curl command line utility. In the following examples, the curl client supplies Negotiate request headers containing content negotiation directives which include: "trans" - The user agent supports transparent content negotiation for the current request. "vlist" - The user agent requests that any transparently negotiated response for the current request includes an Alternates header with the variant list bound to the negotiable resource. Implies "trans". "*" - The user agent allows servers and proxies to run any remote variant selection algorithm. The server returns a TCN response header signalling that the resource is transparently negotiated and either a choice or a list response as appropriate. In the first curl exchange, the user agent indicates to the server that, of the formats it recognizes, HTML is preferred and it instructs the server to perform transparent content negotiation. In the response, the Vary header field expresses the parameters the server used to select a representation, i.e. only the Negotiate and Accept header fields are considered.

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$ curl -i -H "Accept: text/xml;q=0.3,text/html;q=1.0 -H "Negotiate: *" http://localhost:8890/DA HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Virtuoso/05.00.3021 (Linux) i686-pc-linux-gn Connection: Keep-Alive Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:43:18 GMT Accept-Ranges: b TCN: choice Vary: negotiate,accept Content-Location: page.html Content-Type: text/html ETag: "14056a25c066a6e0a6e65889754a0602" Content-Length: 49 <html> <body> some html </body> </html>

Next, the source quality values are adjusted so that the user agent indicates that XML is its preferred format.

$ curl -i -H "Accept: text/xml,text/html;q=0.7,text/ -H "Negotiate: *" http://localhost:8890/DA HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Virtuoso/05.00.3021 (Linux) Connection: Keep-Alive Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:44:07 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: choice Vary: negotiate,accept Content-Location: page.xml Content-Type: text/xml ETag: "8b09f4b8e358fcb7fd1f0f8fa918973a" Content-Length: 39 <?xml version="1.0" ?> <a>some xml</a>

In the final example, the user agent wants to decide itself which is the most suitable representation, so it asks for a list of variants. The server provides the list, in the form of an Alternates response header, and, in addition, sends an HTML representation of the list so that the end user can decide on the preferred variant himself if the user agent is unable to.

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$ curl -i -H "Accept: text/xml,text/html;q=0.7,text/ -H "Negotiate: vlist" http://localhost:889 HTTP/1.1 300 Multiple Choices Server: Virtuoso/05.00.3021 (Linux) i686-pc-linux-gn Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=I Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:44:35 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: list Vary: negotiate,accept Alternates: {"page.html" 0.900000 {type text/html}}, {"page.xml" 1.000000 {type text/xml}} Content-Length: 368 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html> <head> <title>300 Multiple Choices</title> </head> <body> <h1>Multiple Choices</h1> Available variants: <ul> <li><a href="page.html">HTML variant</a>, type text/ <li><a href="page.txt">Text document</a>, type text/ <li><a href="page.xml">XML variant</a>, type text/xm </ul> </body> </html>

Our next example illustrates the use of a slash URI scheme in an RDF view, and shows how to combine URL rewriting and transparent content negotiation. The example is taken from the RDF View tutorial , one of many Virtuoso on-line tutorials. The view generates an RDF rendering of Virtuoso's Northwind 'Demo' database. (Note: The 'tutorial' RDF view described here is distinct from the hash-URI-based 'demo' RDF view created by the Demonstration VAD.) If you intend trying the example locally, both the Demonstration and Tutorial VADs must be installed on the local machine.

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To generate the RDF view and setup the URL rewriting rules, the tutorial runs the script rd_v_1.sql (see the 'View Source' tab of the RDF View tutorial, or WebDAV folder DAV/VAD /tutorial/rdfview/rd_v_1). The view creates two RDF graphs:
http://<URIQADefaultHost>/tutorial /Northwind - containing the base RDF data http://<URIQADefaultHost>/tutorial /Northwind/ontology - containing the OWL class

definitions A slash URI scheme is adhered to throughout. Each entity exposed by the view is identified by the URI prefix
http://<URIQADefaultHost>/tutorial/Northwind /resource/. For example:

http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northwind/resource /Customer/ALFKI http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northwind/resource /Order/10692 RDF and HTML representation documents describing Northwind entities are identified by URIs with prefixes
http://<URIQADefaultHost>/tutorial/Northwind /data/ and http://<URIQADefaultHost>/tutorial /Northwind/page/, e.g.

http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northwind /data/Customer/ALFKI.xml http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northwind /data/Customer/ALFKI.n3 http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northwind /data/Customer/ALFKI.ttl http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northwind /page/Customer/ALFKI.html Transparent content negotiation is enabled to allow entity

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representations to be rendered in several formats. The available variants can be seen using curl. e.g.

curl -I -L -H "Negotiate: vlist" "http://demo.openli

returns

HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.10.3038 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 11:11:19 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: list Vary: negotiate,accept Alternates: {"ALFKI.html" 0.600000 {type text/html}} {"ALFKI.ttl" 0.700000 {type application/x-turtle}}, Location: http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northw Content-Length: 443

Requesting RDF/XML as the preferred representation of a resource (and requesting only the HTTP headers be displayed)

curl -I -L -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml;q=0.95,te -H "Negotiate: *" "http://demo.openlinksw

returns

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HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.10.3038 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 16:17:11 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: choice Vary: negotiate,accept Content-Location: ALFKI.xml Content-Type: application/rdf+xml; qs=0.9025 Location: http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northw Content-Length: 0 HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.10.3038 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 16:17:11 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Location: http://demo.openlinksw.com/sparql?defaultquery=DESCRIBE+%3Chttp%3A//demo.openlinksw.com/tutor Content-Length: 0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Virtuoso/05.10.3038 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: Keep-Alive Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 16:17:11 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Type: application/rdf+xml; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 6358

Likewise, specifying N3 as the preferred format

curl -I -L -H "Accept: text/rdf+n3;q=1.0,application -H "Negotiate: *" "http://demo.openlinksw

generates

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HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.10.3038 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 16:30:27 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: choice Vary: negotiate,accept Content-Location: ALFKI.n3 Content-Type: text/rdf+n3; qs=0.8 Location: http://demo.openlinksw.com/tutorial/Northw Content-Length: 0 HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.10.3038 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 16:30:28 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Location: http://demo.openlinksw.com/sparql?defaultquery=DESCRIBE+%3Chttp%3A//demo.openlinksw.com/tutor Content-Length: 0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Virtuoso/05.10.3038 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: Keep-Alive Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 16:30:28 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Type: text/rdf+n3; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 2018

To explain how this TCN configuration is set up, the salient portions of the rd_v_1.sql setup script are described below. A URL rewriting rule list, nwtut_rule_list_1, is associated with logical path /tutorial/Northwind/resource. Two rules, resource_rule_1 and resource_rule_2 are added to the rule list. Each rewrites request paths containing '/tutorial
/Northwind/resource/'.

DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE (lpath=>'/tutorial/Northwind/res ppath=>'/DAV/VAD/tutorial/rdfview/rd_v_1/', is_dav vsp_user=>'dba',opts=>vector ('url_rewrite', 'nwtu ... DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_RULELIST ('nwtut_rule_list_

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The first rule, resource_rule_1, acts as a 'catch all', handling requests for content types not handled by the second rule. The latter handles requests for different RDF serialization formats: RDF/XML, N3, TTL, redirecting them to path
/tutorial/Northwind/data/... . resource_rule_1 forces

requests for any other content types to 'text/html', redirecting the request to path /tutorial/Northwind/page/... .

DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ('resource_rule_ vector ('par_1'), 1,'/tutorial/Northwind/page/%s', vector ('par_1'), NULL, NULL, 2, 303, NULL); DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ('resource_rule_ vector ('par_1'), 1,'/tutorial/Northwind/data/%s', vector ('par_1'), NULL, '(application/rdf.xml)|(te

So, requests for /tutorial/Northwind/resource/$1 are routed to: /tutorial/Northwind/data/$1.xml - if content type application/rdf+xml was requested /tutorial/Northwind/data/$1.n3 - if content type text/rdf+n3 was requested /tutorial/Northwind/data/$1.ttl - if content type application/x-turtle was requested /tutorial/Northwind/page/$1.html - if content type text/html, or any other content type, was requested where $1 signifies the remainder portion of the input path. The Customer entity ALFKI has four description document variants, ALFKI.xml, ALFKI.n3, ALFKI.ttl and ALFKI.html. Each variant is described using function HTTP_VARIANT_ADD. (Here, the '$' character is coded using its hex value, \x24.)

DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD

('nwtut_rule_list_1', ('nwtut_rule_list_1', ('nwtut_rule_list_1', ('nwtut_rule_list_1',

'(.*)' '(.*)' '(.*)' '(.*)'

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Finally, the paths /tutorial/Northwind/data and

/tutorial/Northwind/page have their own rewrite rules,

attached to rule lists nwtut_rule_list2 and nwtut_rule_list3 respectively.

DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE (lpath=>'/tutorial/Northwind/dat ppath=>'/DAV/VAD/tutorial/rdfview/rd_v_1/', is_dav=>1, is_brws=>1, vsp_user=>'dba',opts=>vecto DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE (lpath=>'/tutorial/Northwind/pag ppath=>'/DAV/VAD/tutorial/rdfview/rd_v_1/', is_dav=>1, is_brws=>1, vsp_user=>'dba', opts=>vector ('url_rewrite', 'nwtut_rule_list_3'))

nwtut_rule_list2 contains three rewrite rules (data_rule_1/2/3), one for each RDF description document variant. Each rewrites the resource request as a SPARQL DESCRIBE query, the only difference between the queries being the request response serialization format. nwtut_rule_list3 contains one rule (page_rule_1) to re-route requests for text/html through the /about/html Sponger proxy, and so generate an HTML rendering. Each rule strips off any file suffix identifying the variant; e.g. only the 'Customer/ALKI' portion of 'Customer/ALFKI.n3' or 'Customer/ALFKI.html' is inserted into the rewritten request.

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DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'data_rule_1', '/sparql?default-graph-uri=http%%3A//^{URIQADefaultH query=DESCRIBE+%%3Chttp%%3A//^{URIQADefaultHost}^/tu vector ('par_1'), NULL, NULL, 2, 303, ''); DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'data_rule_2', '/sparql?default-graph-uri=http%%3A//^{URIQADefaultH query=DESCRIBE+%%3Chttp%%3A//^{URIQADefaultHost}^/tu vector ('par_1'), NULL, NULL, 2, 303, ''); DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'data_rule_3', '/sparql?default-graph-uri=http%%3A//^{URIQADefaultH query=DESCRIBE+%%3Chttp%%3A//^{URIQADefaultHost}^/tu vector ('par_1', 'f'), NULL, NULL, 2, 303, ''); DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'page_rule_1', '/about/html/http://^{URIQADefaultHost}^/tutorial/No vector ('par_1'), NULL, '(text/html)', 2, 303);

Under the umbrella of the W3C Linking Open Data (LOD) Community Project, DBpedia is a well known initiative to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information available on the Web. The DBpedia knowledge base is accessible through a SPARQL endpoint or through a Linked Data interface. As DBpedia defines Linked Data URIs for millions of concepts, it forms one of the central interlinking hubs in the LOD Cloud and the emerging Web of Data. When serving the DBpedia dataset as Linked Data, DBpedia supports transparent content negotiation in a similar manner to that already described for the Northwind Tutorial RDF View. Indeed, the Northwind RDF View's TCN configuration was modelled as a simplifed version of DBpedia's. DBpedia uses a slash URI scheme when distinguishing between resource and description document URIs. Depending on the content type preferences of the consuming

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client expressed in any 'Accept' request headers and the 'best' variant as selected by the server, a request for resource http://dbpedia.org/resource/The_Beatles is redirected to one of: http://dbpedia.org/page/The_Beatles (default, or if text/html requested) http://dbpedia.org/data/The_Beatles.xml (if 'best' RDF variant is application/rdf+xml) http://dbpedia.org/data/The_Beatles.n3 (if 'best' RDF variant is text/rdf+n3) http://dbpedia.org/data/The_Beatles.ttl (if 'best' RDF variant is application/x-turtle) As with the Northwind RDF view, the URI prefixes
http://dbpedia.org/resource/..., http/dbpedia.org/page/... and http://dbpedia.org /data/... distinguish between a resource and its HTML or

RDF description documents. The available RDF description document variants can be listed using curl. The command:

curl -I -L -H "Negotiate: vlist" -H "Accept: applica

yields:

HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.11.3039 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 14:47:31 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: list Vary: negotiate,accept Alternates: {"The_Beatles.n3" 0.800000 {type text/rd {"The_Beatles.xml" 0.950000 {type application/rdf+ Location: http://dbpedia.org/data/__The_Beatles Content-Length: 418

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Requesting resource "The_Beatles" with RDF/XML as the preferred description format, using:

curl -I -L -H "Negotiate: *" -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml;q=0.95,te "http://dbpedia.org/resource/The_Beatles"

returns:

HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.11.3039 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 14:56:39 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: choice Vary: negotiate,accept Content-Location: The_Beatles.xml Content-Type: application/rdf+xml; qs=0.9025 Location: http://dbpedia.org/data/The_Beatles.xml Content-Length: 0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Virtuoso/05.11.3039 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: Keep-Alive Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 14:56:40 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Type: application/rdf+xml; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 55844

Changing the preferred description format to N3:

curl -I -L -H "Negotiate: *" -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml;q=0.70,te "http://dbpedia.org/resource/The_Beatles"

results in the response:

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HTTP/1.1 303 See Other Server: Virtuoso/05.11.3039 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: close Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 15:00:16 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes TCN: choice Vary: negotiate,accept Content-Location: The_Beatles.n3 Content-Type: text/rdf+n3; qs=0.76 Location: http://dbpedia.org/data/The_Beatles.n3 Content-Length: 0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Virtuoso/05.11.3039 (Solaris) x86_64-sun-sol Connection: Keep-Alive Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 15:00:20 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Type: text/rdf+n3; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 29259

DBpedia's URL rewriting rules and TCN support are configured using script dbpedia_init.sql, portions of which are listed below. For completeness, dbpedia_init.sql is available here. Using VHOST_DEFINE, the logical paths http://dbpedia.org /resource, http://dbpedia.org/page and http://dbpedia.org/data are each associated with URL rewriting rule lists. Requests to /resource are redirected to
/page/%s or /data/__%s accordingly depending on

whether an HTML or RDF description is being requested, and where %s is the portion of the request path after
/resource/. Resource descriptions provided by path /data/__%s are available in three variants RDF/XML, N3 and

TTL - each variant is described using HTTP_VARIANT_ADD.

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DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE ( lhost=>':80', vhost=>'dbpedia. ppath=>'/', is_dav=>0, def_page=>'', opts=>vector ('url_rewrite', 'dbp_rule_list_2')); ... DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE ( lhost=>':80', vhost=>'dbpedia. lpath=>'/page', ppath=>registry_get('_dbpedia_path_'), is_dav=>atoi (registry_get('_dbpedia_dav_')), opts=>vector ('url_rewrite', 'dbp_rule_list_7')); ... DB.DBA.VHOST_DEFINE ( lhost=>':80', vhost=>'dbpedia. ppath=>registry_get('_dbpedia_path_'), is_dav=>atoi (registry_get('_dbpedia_dav_')), vsp_us opts=>vector ('url_rewrite', 'pvsp_rule_list2')); DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_RULELIST ( 'dbp_rule_list_2 DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'dbp_rule_14', '/page/%s', vector ('par_1'), NULL, NULL, 2, 303, NU DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'dbp_rule_12', '/data/__%s', vector ('par_1'), NULL, '(application/ delete from DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_MAP where VM_RULELIS DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD ('dbp_rule_list_2', '__(.*)' DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD ('dbp_rule_list_2', '__(.*)' DB.DBA.HTTP_VARIANT_ADD ('dbp_rule_list_2', '__(.*)' ... DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_RULELIST ( 'dbp_rule_list_7 DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'dbp_rule_13', registry_get('_dbpedia_path_')||'description.vsp?res NULL, NULL, 0, 0, ''); ... DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_RULELIST ( 'pvsp_rule_list2 DB.DBA.URLREWRITE_CREATE_REGEX_RULE ( 'pvsp_data_rul '/sparql?default-graph-uri=http%%3A%%2F%%2Fdbpedia.o query=DESCRIBE+%%3Chttp%%3A%%2F%%2Fdbpedia.org%%2Fre vector ('par_1'), NULL, NULL, 2, null, '');

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Requests redirected to /data/__%s are redirected to

/data/%s.xml, /data/%s.ttl or /data/%s.(n3|rdf)

depending on the content type of the chosen variant. The data for these RDF variants is furnished by similar SPARQL DESCRIBE queries which differ only in the format= query string parameter used to specify the result set representation format. Requests redirected to /page/%s are in turn redirected to the page description template description.vsp which provides the HTML rendering. In effect, this is equivalent to the external 303 redirect to the /about/html proxy used by the Northwind tutorial RDF view - the proxy uses description.vsp internally.

With Yahoo and Google both having announced support for RDFa, this format has arguably become the most important of the RDF syntaxes. From the perspective of content providers, RDFa brings other benefits beyond the obvious attraction of increasing your content's page rank by providing more accurate, semantically richer metadata to RDFa aware crawlers. Key amongst these is that RDFa provides the simplest route to deploying Linked Data.

In this guide we have emphasized the distinction between a real world concept or entity and its, possibly many, descriptions, where each description is associated with a different media-type. Earlier examples have shown how to

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serve multiple representation formats: HTML, RDF/XML, N3, TTL etc. In essence these formats boil down to a choice between either an HTML representation or some variant of RDF. What RDFa gives you is both representations combined in a single entity description document. Consequently the need for content negotiation or 303 redirects to different representation documents is removed. This fundamental difference is depicted in the following three diagrams contrasting the differences between serving content using HTML+RDFa and serving separate HTML and RDF description documents through a hash or slash URI scheme.

Content negotiation with a hash URI scheme

Content negotiation and 303 redirect with a slash URI scheme

HTML+RDFa potentially removes the need for

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content negotiation and HTTP redirects

While authors of small sites might opt to serve static content and mark up their HTML with RDFa manually, for large datasets this becomes unattractive. In cases where the HTML representation itself is being generated from an RDF quad store, it makes sense to generate any embedded RDFa alongside the HTML. Virtuoso provides this option through description.vsp, a Virtuoso Server Page which provides an HTML description of RDF Linked Data. Appendix A provides a brief overview. When dereferencing an entity URI, the description returned is determined by the media-type(s) specified in any Accept headers expressing the client's preferred representation formats. A client can request an XHTML+RDFa description by supplying an Accept header with a media-type of application/xhtml+xml or text/html. In the absence of Accept headers, OpenLink's rewriting rules are normally configured to return HTML+RDFa by default. (Rewriting rules configured by the rdf_mappers VAD typically use this convention.) As our earlier coverage of Virtuoso's proxy service URIs explained, requests for an HTML rendering of an entity description are normally redirected internally to the /about/html proxy. This proxy in turn uses description.vsp to generate an HTML rendering with embedded RDFa. So, by exploiting the default URL rewriting rules, internal redirects (as opposed to much slower external 303 redirects) and the /about/html proxy service, it is possible to combine description.vsp's HTML+RDFa generation capabilities with the deployment benefits of RDFa.

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If viewing Virtuoso purely as an RDF publishing service, RDFa simply constitutes another supported syntax for encoding RDF metadata, alongside RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, NTriples and JSON. However, RDF metadata drawn from the Virtuoso quad store and rendered in one of these formats can itself have been extracted directly or synthesised from a multitude of non-RDF data sources using Virtuoso's Sponger. (Obviously raw RDF data can also be imported directly.) When sponging an XHTML resource, the Sponger will, via the xHTML cartridge, automatically ingest any RDFa found and cache the extracted RDF in the quad store. But, the Sponger can also generate RDF metadata describing non-RDF data sources. The net result is that the Sponger in combination with description.vsp can generate RDFa for data sources containing neither RDF nor RDFa.

As well as being invoked by the /about/html proxy, description.vsp also underpins the OpenLink Data Explorer's "View Page Metadata" option. ODE provides a simple means to examine the RDFa generated by description.vsp. The screenshot below shows ODE's "View Page Metadata" output when http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter is sponged by the public Sponger at http://linkeddata.uriburner.com. The subsequent screenshot highlights some of the RDFa markup in a heavily cutdown extract from the description.vsp generated page source.

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Sponged Twitter company profile

Page source extract highlighting snippets of generated RDFa

Essentially, in the description.vsp output page, values listed under the "Has Attributes & Values" tab are described using RDFa attributes @rel and @resource, if the object part of the triple is a URI, or using @property if the object part is a literal. Entities listed under the "Is Attribute Value Of" tab are

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described using RDFa attributes @rev and @resource.

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