As part of a series titled “Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology,” this book catalogs reusable solutions that address problems encountered in resource-oriented architectures for the Web.

The book includes three chapters spanning 75 pages. The first chapter describes four informational patterns that offer guidance on how we organize information in ways that can be easily shared. These patterns include:

• information resources that are used for providing addressable, resolvable, relatively coarse-grained resources or pieces of information;
• collection resources that are forms of information resource patterns that allow us to refer to sets of resources;
• linked data that are used for creating networks of interrelated resources; and
• named queries that generalize the idea of providing an identifier for a reusable query.

Information organized by the informational patterns is considered a primary resource. The second chapter introduces applicative patterns that transform and manipulate these primary resources, allowing us to extend them to new uses. These patterns include:

• guards that serve as protection mechanisms for primary resources;
• gateways that serve as proxies for clients interested in manipulating one or more primary resources on backend servers;
• resource heatmaps that allow metadata associated with primary resources, such as its usage, access, failure rates, and other metrics, to be captured; and
• transformations that are generalizations of approaches to producing new resources that extract content from or transform the shape of content from another resource.

The transformation and manipulation of primary resources leads to secondary resources. The procedural patterns discussed in the final chapter show how we can connect these primary and secondary resources to fulfill the needs of modern business systems. These patterns include:

• callbacks that help servers reach back to clients to alert them of updates to application states or progress in a workflow;
• curated uniform resource identifiers (URIs) that deal with curating identities into long-lived, reusable resource identifiers to meet the stability requirements of real businesses;
• informed routers, which provide context-aware routing mechanisms, allowing one to make smarter, more adaptive routing decisions based on application and system state; and
• workflows that make it possible to traverse a client-navigated and coordinated path through a system.

These patterns not only provide insights into how to link and use open data on the Web, but they also provide guidance on how to develop resource-oriented systems within an organization’s firewall. Anyone interested in developing such systems will benefit tremendously from this book. The author intends to provide workable examples based on these patterns at https://github.com/bsletten/roa-book-examples; however, at the time of this writing, these examples were not available.

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