Over the years Rational has seen and tried a variety of approaches, but they have had limitations. For instance, if your tools interact through proprietary, language-specific APIs, you end up with an exponential number of APIs and versioning issues. The API approach doesn’t scale. Another approach has been for all tools to converse with a central database. But this usually depends on a schema that is acceptable to all parties, which is more difficult to achieve and proves fragile as needs change.
Though there are supporters of these approaches; IBM was not satisfied. We realized that many characteristics we sought were present in the Internet and Linked Data. We have moved from a “tool-centric” approach to a “data-centric approach” based on Web standards. In this decentralized and scalable model, every piece of information that we have (e.g., a bug report) is addressable with a URI and can be accessed with HTTP.
” Interview: IBM on the Linked Data Platform
