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Seth (and commenters) - The basic point is sound, but there are some important issues that are averted or are elided in the original article in order to make the underlying point more clearly. 1: It should be quite clear that there is no need to develop an API for the sole purpose of generating an alternate representation of a [document] in a form that is intended to be machine actionable as opposed to one that is intended to be rendered for human consumption, and the referent This is precisely what the content negotiation mechanism was designed for. 2: It is less clear, but still reasonable, to use content negotiation to treat content types for the same URI polysemously (having related,but slightly different senses). For example, the HTML rendering of a URI may carry slightly different propositional content than is carried in a set of RDF assertions*. 3: For stative actions not related to content, a formally defined API is required. 4: Since there is no intrinsic relationship between two objects with different URIs, breaking the connection for items which are identical** may require extra work to repair. 5: Cacheable content negotiation in HTTP has been around since the mid-late nineties. It's retro-chic. 6: API keys that protect information extractable from non-api protected sources were created to encourage people to learn how to implement screen-scrapers and finite state transducers. 7: The commenter who brought up the issue of the same URI denoting different FRBR entities must make a number of metaphysical commitments. Resulting models are FRBR-like, but are not pure FRBR. If the 1:1 principle were real, any of these approaches would present insuperable difficulties. Simon * Under a documentationalist interpretation, the propositional content must be different, so allowing at least some degree of polysemy is hard to avoid. ** absolute identity cannot apply, but most forms of relative identity have obvious interpretations. On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Seth van Hooland <[log in to unmask]>wrote: > Dear all, > > I guess some of you will be interested in the blogpost of my colleague and > co-author Ruben regarding the misunderstandings on the use and abuse of > APIs in a digital libraries context, including a description of both good > and bad practices from Europeana, DPLA and the Cooper Hewitt museum: > > http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2013/11/29/the-lie-of-the-api/ > > Kind regards, > > Seth van Hooland > Président du Master en Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la > Communication (MaSTIC) > Université Libre de Bruxelles > Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50 CP 123 | 1050 Bruxelles > http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~svhoolan/ > http://twitter.com/#!/sethvanhooland > http://mastic.ulb.ac.be > 0032 2 650 4765 > Office: DC11.102 >