LBAP (Linkbase Access Protocol)

LBAP Abstract

XLink treats links as first-class objects, which means that links may be regarded as separate entities outside of the resources that they are linking. XLink supports a sophisticated linking model that can support advanced hypermedia presentations. However, how links are generated, maintained, transferred, and presented it not within XLink's scope. In XLink, linkbases are simply XML documents which are collections of third-party links. From XLink's point of view, this is suffcient, but it is not suffcient from the perspective of transforming the Web into an open hypermedia system. For this vision to become a reality, an open protocol must exist which can be used by clients to access linkbases and request links from them. Linkbases potentially contain huge numbers of links, and it is therefore not practical for clients to retrieve the entire linkbase in order to find the links that are relevant for a given document. What therefore is necessary is some kind of query mechanism that can be used to retrieve the links from a linkbase that are relevant for a given Web resource. And because client and linkbase must communicate over the Internet, a protocol must be used which supports this query mechanism. It is the purpose of the Linkbase Access Protocol (LBAP) to describe the potential solutions to this problem.

LBAP Publications

• Erik Wilde, "A Proposal for an XLink Data Model", Technical Report TIK-Report No. 148, Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK), ETH Zürich, August 2002.
• Erik Wilde and David Lowe, "XPath, XLink, XPointer, and XML: A Practical Guide to Web Hyperlinking and Transclusion", Addison Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, July 2002, ISBN 0-201-70344-0.
• Erik Wilde, "Protocol Considerations for Web Linkbase Access", Technical Report TIK-Report No. 143, Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK), ETH Zürich, July 2002.
• Erik Wilde, "Linkbase Access Protocol Design", Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2002), Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2002.
• Erik Wilde and Christian Stillhard, "Openly Accessing Linkbases", Technical Report TIK-Report No. 134, Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK), ETH Zürich, January 2002.
• David Lowe and Erik Wilde, "Improving Web Linking Using XLink", Open Publish 2001, Sydney, July 2001.
• Erik Wilde and David Lowe, "From Content-centered Publishing to a Link-based View of Information Resources", 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-33), Maui, Hawaii, January 2000.