Re: NETCONF WG meeting minutes for IETF #57

[Graham Klyne <gk@ninebynine.org>]

At 17:31 04/09/03 +0200, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
> Back to RDF: If I understand RDF right, then we would have to accept
> that all resources on a device are actually named by a URI and the
> configuration basically becomes a set of properties associated with
> those URIs (representing resources).

Not necessarily, but such an approach would be possible.

Practical work using RDF has tended to allocate URIs for key identified 
concepts and relations, and allows other concepts to be un-named.  For 
example, in the case of a network device, it may be that instead of 
assigning a URI to identify each network interface, one refers to "the 
interface with IP address w.x.y.z", or "with MAC address xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx".

(Such discussions are very much easier if grounded in some real 
experimental data.)

>  I guess I have to dive deeper
> into RDF to understand how complex relationships between resources can
> be represented. Such a capability would surely be a big plus compared
> to a simple tree structure.

I think that the work that has been done to use E-R style modelling for 
network device configuration (CIM?) would be represented quite comfortably 
using RDF.

I further note that it is not currently the role of this WG to address such 
issues (but I couldn't resist responding ;-), though I do hope the 
configuration protocol does not preclude using such ideas.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
GK@NineByNine.org


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