[UC] Pagination, filtering and ordering

[srosset81]

As an end user,
I want to paginate and filter data,
So that I get the data I need with good performances.

Preconditions:

Large amount of resources are stored in a container.

Trigger:

The user want to get only a small subset of the resources within the container.

Actors:

N/A

Distinction:

The user may want to filter or sort by predicates.
Maybe the possibility of filtering by keyword (full text search) may be useful as well.
For ordering, we may want to choose a ascending or descending order.
For ordering, we may want data even if the sort predicate doesn't exist.

Scenario:

N/A

Alternative case(s):

If a SPARQL endpoint was available, this would be less necessary.

Error scenario:

N/A

Acceptance Criteria:

N/A

References:

For paging, this spec exists: https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp-paging

Ordering with RDF is difficult. We have long discussions about this here: assemblee-virtuelle/semapps#568

[CxRes]

Few observations:

1. This is in part related to the UCS [UC] Authoring Arbitrary Hypermedia #33, where I illustrate the need to author arbitrary hypermedia. Your UCS highlights, the need for authors to be able to control/configure pagination, as well as servers' ability to do automatic pagination, say, on RDF data. These need to made available to clients as hypermedia affordances.
2. A QUERY method has been proposed at the HTTPWG https://httpwg.org/http-extensions/draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-method-w-body.html which could be a natural way to make SPARQL requests.
3. I have started a discussion on extending HTTP content negotiation to allow complex media-type descriptions. This might be a way to allow servers/intermediaries to communicate that they are providing filtered responses in a more granular manner. The discussions are unfortunately split between HTTPWG and Media Types mailing lists.
   • https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2025JanMar/0007.html
   • https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/media-types/nLHxeKdD2YOHlCb9x45d2M-tmlk/