Temporal rest - How to really exploit XML

Abstract

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is more than a unified data exchange and storage format. We suggest the exploitation of XML and look at it as a fine-granular node tree, which is grown up through a sequence of user modifications. The Representational State Transfer (REST) is the perfect candidate to expose XML resources as well as their full revision and modification history to the World Wide Web. Extending the idea of XML and REST along the natural modification-driven temporal dimension breeds something, which is scalable, robust, simple, and yet extensible enough to effectively enrich striving applications such as personal information management, collaborative document authoring, distributed content management, or geographic visual analytics. In this paper, we introduce Temporal REST, i.e., an interface and protocol to access web-based XML resources as well as their full revision and modification history. We describe the underlying data model and show how it solves problems inherently arising from temporal interactions in a pragmatic and straightforward way. In addition, we provide a case study to demonstrate the power of Temporal REST due to its elegance and true simplicity. Finally, we motivate future work including the implementation of back-end services as well as front-end applications both of which will mutually benefit from Temporal REST.