Dare Obasanjo points out that Microsoft Sharepoint offers "by reference" as opposed to "by value" mail attachment capability that Jon Udellreviewedin a recent blog post,true! So does Virtuoso in a number of ways (most importantly independent ofclient or serveroperating system).

This issue really brings WebDAV into scope as this is the protocol that enables this capability (as covered by Jon's piece), and it is one of the many client and server side protocols implemented by OpenLink Virtuoso(the key to how Virtuoso delivers URI based SQL-XML, XQuery, XPathservices).

When you install Virtuoso you simply have to start the Virtuoso server instanceto the get WebDAV functionality going. All of Virtuoso's services are advertised at ports, and in the case of WebDAV you will find this at port 8890 if you start the demo database.

To exploit the Virtuoso/WebDAV server from any WebDAV client (or point urls at WebDAV hosted resources) simply do the following:

  1. Install Virtuoso and depending on your OS do the following:
    • Windows - create a Web Folder that points to a WebDAV server
    • Mac OS X - mount a WebDAV folder
    • Linux - mount a WebDAV directory(also see the Davfs2 Open Source project)
    • You can also make WebDAV client calls from Virtuoso's Stored Procedure Language (Virtuoso PL) or use WebDAV implementations in any development environment of your choice (.NET, Java, .
  2. Place content that you want to reference in your mails in your WebDAV repository via any of the client side mechanisms described in step 1. You can see the results of this in my earlier blog post, even better pass the url on in an email! Or browse the WebDAV folder (there are some nuggets deliberately left in place :-) )
    • You could simply save an Office Doc (powerpoint, excel, word etc)to this location and the circulate urls in your mails (this has been standard practice at OpenLink for many years; we even have a full blown portal server that would soon be available as a public service to sharing anything via DAV and as usual some more... stay tuned)
  3. That's it for any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX etc.) once you install Virtuoso!

BTW - This blog is WebDAV based (it's a live instance of Virtuoso doing many things; WebDAV, HTTP, SQL-XML based feed generation for ATOM, RSS, Blog Post APIs support (Moveable Type, Metaweblog, Blogger, ATOM), Free Text, XPath, XQuery, and more).