Search & Type Index

1. Type index
2. Type search
   1. Errors
3. The derived index

The storage description advertises a TypeIndexService and a TypeSearchService, each with a serviceEndpoint. Both answer application/lws+json, are paginated (?page=N with first/prev/next/last Link relations), and are authorization-filtered for the requesting client — a type or resource the client cannot read never appears, and totalItems counts only that view, so a client cannot discover that a private type or resource exists. Responses are Cache-Control: private, no-store.

A resource’s types are its structural LWS type (lws:Container / lws:DataResource), the types a client declared with Link: rel="type" on a write or in its linkset (lws10-index’s preferred source), and any rdf:type its own representation asserts about itself (the resource IRI or a hash fragment of it). All three are treated identically.

Type index

GET /.lws/type-index lists the distinct types visible to the client:

{ "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/lws/v1", "type": "TypeIndex", "totalItems": 5,
  "items": [ { "id": "https://schema.org/Person" }, { "id": "https://schema.org/Event" } ] }

Type search

Type Search is an HTTP QUERY (RFC 10008) to the TypeSearchService endpoint whose body is an application/lws-query+json filter in conjunctive normal form; it returns a synthetic ContainerPage whose items carry id and type. A nested array is OR and the outer array is AND:

QUERY /.lws/type-search    Content-Type: application/lws-query+json
{ "type": [ ["https://schema.org/Person", "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person"],
            "https://www.w3.org/ns/lws#DataResource" ] }

selects (schema:Person OR foaf:Person) AND lws:DataResource.

curl -X QUERY -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H 'Content-Type: application/lws-query+json' \
     --data '{"type":["https://schema.org/Person"]}' http://localhost:8080/.lws/type-search

• The filter is plain JSON: an @-member is ignored, duplicates are ignored, an empty value is no constraint, and every key is optional — {} matches every resource the client may read.
• Besides type, a key names a link relation, with the same grammar: a registered name such as describedby matches the links the resource’s metadata declares, and an absolute-URI key matches those and the triples its representation asserts with that predicate. A relation the server does not index yields no matches, indistinguishably from a target nothing declares; the server-managed relations are never indexed.
• OPTIONS answers Allow: OPTIONS, QUERY and Accept-Query: application/lws-query+json.
• Page links (first/prev/next/last) are opaque and dereferenced with GET: they carry the filter (?q=…&page=N), not the client’s authorization, which is applied again on every page.

The GET/POST search forms of the drafts before July 2026 are gone.

Errors

Status	Cause
400	A missing Content-Type, a malformed filter, an empty OR-group, or a value that is not an absolute IRI.
415	A query format other than application/lws-query+json (the response carries Accept-Query).
422	A filter past the complexity bound (32 groups / 256 values) — never silently narrowed.
406	An Accept that excludes the JSON result formats.
404	A page link that is past the last page or no longer recognized.
405	An unsupported method.

The derived index

Types are served from an in-memory derived index, built lazily on first use and maintained incrementally from resource events (create/update/delete); relation targets are not cached and are queried on demand for the predicates a search needs.

Per lws10-index (formerly lws10-searchindex), type/relation membership may be eventually consistent — though synchronous event delivery makes it read-your-writes in practice. Authorization is never cached: it is applied live, per request, over the index, so a revoked grant takes effect immediately, and totalItems reflects only the requesting client’s authorized view (responses also carry Vary: Authorization). Structural/protocol relations are never indexed.

Set lws.search-index.enabled=false to stop advertising and serving these services; lws.search-index.page-size (default 100) bounds the items per page.