Making a Book Recommendation System RESTful

The objective is to take simple ontologies, a service using them and then try to see how to make them RESTful. And try to answer the question: Is there a systematic way to make any ontology RESTful?

My supervisor suggested a Book recommendation service. Like in Amazon books are recommended to users. In our example the recommended books list is generated for a user, by recommending books bought by other people, who already bought the same books that the user has.

Designing the Service

-This service can be complicated or simple, it can be either on the server side or on the client side.

I chose it to be on the server.

A question that arises is: are we solving the right kind of problem here?

Ontology Design

Person :hasName

Book :hasTitle

Relationships

Property	Subject	Object	Notes
hasAuthored	Person	Book	Inverse
hasAuthor	Book	Person
hasCopy	Person	Book

Resource Design

URI	Method	Description	Client Sent Payload
/BookOntology/	GET	Gets the ontology	-
	POST	Creates a book instance	-
	PUT	N/A	-
	DELETE	N/A	-
/BookOntology/All/	GET	Gets all the book instances URIs	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	N/A	-
	DELETE	N/A	-
/BookOntology/{Book_Id}	GET	Returns the book’s info.	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	To update or insert the book’s info	Title, etc
	DELETE	Deletes the book instance	-
/BookOntology/{Book_Id}/Authors	GET	Returns the book’s authors URIs	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	To add an author	Person’s URI
	DELETE	Deletes all authors: removes the association between the book and persons	-
/BookOntology/{Book_Id}/Authors/ {Author_ID}	GET	Redirects to the author (as a person instance and gets the info)	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	Redirects to the author	Depends
	DELETE	Deletes the author: removes the association between the book and person	-
/PersonOntology/	GET	Gets the ontology	-
	POST	Creates a person instance	-
	PUT	N/A	-
	DELETE	N/A	-
/PersonOntology/{Person_Id}	GET	Returns the person’s info.	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	To update or insert the person’s info	Name, etc
	DELETE	Deletes the person’s instance	-
/PersonOntology/{Person_Id}/ AuthoredBooks/	GET	Gets books authored by the person	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	Adds a book	Book’s URI
	DELETE	Deletes the relationships between the person and the	-
/PersonOntology/{Person_Id}/ AuthoredBooks/{Book_Id}	GET	Redirects to the book and gets the info	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	Redirects to the book	Depends
	DELETE	Deletes the book: removes the association between the book and person	-
/PersonOntology/{Person_Id}/ BookCopies/	GET	Similar to: /PersonOntology/{Person_Id}/ AuthoredBooks/ /PersonOntology/{Person_Id}/ AuthoredBooks/{Book_Id}
	POST
	PUT
	DELETE
/PersonOntology/{Person_Id}/ BookCopies/{Book_Id}	GET
	POST
	PUT
	DELETE
/PersonOntology/{Person_Id}/{Recommended_Books}	GET	Gets the list of recommended books	-
	POST	N/A	-
	PUT	N/A	-
	DELETE	N/A	-

In the next post I will discuss some issues.