Overview

Introduction

The Fedora 4 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 4 RDF-based responses may be serialized as:

application/n3 (or text/rdf+n3 or text/n3)
application/n-quads
application/n-triples
application/rdf+json
application/rdf+xml
text/trig
text/turtle

The text/html response also includes embedded RDFa markup.

The API is based loosely around 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

Changes planned

Asynchronous API support

Endpoints

Resources

Repository objects can be loosely divided into two classes of resources:

- Object and containers ("fedora:object"), containing RDF properties and 0 or more child nodes
- Binaries, containing any binary payload (roughly corresponding to Fedora 3 datastreams)