POSTtä

POSTtä is a fictional data interchange protocol described in this article for use in speculative and educational contexts. It is described as an open, interoperable mechanism to publish, annotate, and retrieve structured data across distributed networks, with an emphasis on simplicity and verifiability.

Origins and design goals: Conceived as part of a hypothetical standards project to illustrate publish-and-consume workflows, POSTtä aims to be lightweight, human-readable, and resilience-oriented. It uses a minimal set of operations and a content-addressed data model to enable reproducible data sharing.

Core concepts: A POSTtä item consists of a payload and a metadata envelope. The envelope includes creator, timestamp, version, and a pointer graph linking related items. The primary operation is POST to publish; retrieval uses content-addressed identifiers. Metadata is signed to support integrity and provenance.

Architecture and usage: Designed for distributed networks, POSTtä favors decentralization, offline-first operation, and simple validation rules. It supports recursive data structures and tagging through a tä suffix that signals taggable and auditable metadata. Because it is fictional, implementations are used primarily in teaching and demonstrations.

Relation to real-world standards: While inspired by REST, HTTP POST, and Linked Data principles, POSTtä is not an active standard and has no official specifications outside this article.