| The Fedora HTTP API is generally a RESTful API. HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE are implemented on most resource paths. The API also relies heavily on content negotiation to deliver context-appropriate responses, and a HATEOAS-driven text/html response (providing a decent GUI experience on top of the repository). |
The Fedora RDF-based responses may be serialized as:
The text/html response also includes embedded RDFa markup.
Fedora implements the Linked Data Platform 1.0 Architecture, which:
[...] describes the use of HTTP for accessing, updating, creating and deleting resources from servers that expose their resources as Linked Data. It provides clarifications and extensions of the rules of Linked Data [LINKED-DATA]:
- Use URIs as names for things
- Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names
- When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF*, SPARQL)
- Include links to other URIs, so that they can discover more things
Repository objects can be loosely divided into two classes of resources:
- Containers ("fedora:Container"), containing RDF properties and 0 or more child resources
- Binaries, containing any binary payload (roughly corresponding to Fedora 3 datastreams)