Those who have labored in the database orchard know about CRUD. It isn’t the stuff you scraped off your shoe, but a set of operations that must be supported for typical database maintenance:
- C = Create a record.
- R = Read a record.
- U = Update a record.
- D = Delete a record.
Then Linked Data came along, which is not typically stored in a standard database, but in a strange beast called a triplestore. To support the need to keep linked data up-to-date, and often through a web-based interface, the W3C is working on a standard for a Linked Data Platform that supports these types of operations via standard HTTP requests such as “GET”, “POST”, “PUT”, “DELETE”, and a new one, “PATCH”.
Your best bet on getting up to speed is to take a look at the W3C’s Linked Data Platform 1.0 Primer. The latest version is hot off the press.