scope:

Purpose and Scope

The web is highly dynamic, with resources continuously being created, updated, and deleted. As a result, using resources from a remote server involves the challenge of remaining in step with its changing content. In many cases, there is no need to reflect a server's evolving content perfectly and, therefore, well-established resource discovery techniques, such as crawling, suffice as an updating mechanism. However, there are significant use cases that require low latency and high accuracy in reflecting a remote server's changing content. These requirements have typically been addressed by ad-hoc technical approaches implemented within a small group of collaborating systems. There have been no widely adopted, web-based approaches.

This ResourceSync specification introduces a range of easy to implement capabilities that a server may support in order to enable remote systems to remain more tightly in step with its evolving resources. It also describes how a server should advertise the capabilities it supports. Remote systems may inspect this information to determine how best to remain aligned with the evolving data.

Each capability provides a different synchronization functionality, such as a list of the server's resources or its recently changed resources, including what the nature of the change was: create, update, or delete. All capabilities are implemented on the basis of the document formats introduced by the Sitemap protocol. Capabilities may be combined to achieve varying levels of functionality and hence meet different local or community requirements. This modularity provides flexibility and makes ResourceSync suitable for a broad range of use cases.