[OSGeo-Standards] Was: "file" formats. Is: GeoWeb

[Rushforth, Peter]

Arnulf,

> Which is why the underlying architecture paradigm is called resource orientation.

Resource and representation is part of REST, yes.  Let's try to be a bit clear about terminology.  At least REST has a definition.  

> If we take some raster data to be the resource
I would say that's not a great starting point for a resource data model.  Maybe "the earth", or some part thereof would be a more concrete concept?

> then any part and information derived from this data is a representation of this resource.

Yes, that's one aspect of the resource-representation duality: the server is free to serve up a partial representation of the whole resource, not only different formats, languages etc. The partial nature of the representation is mitigated by the ability to include links to other parts in hypertext.

> It is perfectly fine for a representation (for example a file) to not
> have any hypertext component or link embedded in them (think PNG image).
> It can still be part of a REST environment. The raster representation
> that is returned for a GET request could well be wrapped into some
> hypertext, this would make things even nicer but is not required at all
> times.

I'm not sure what you mean by "at all times".  That statement is taken by most
"REST APIs" to mean "never", or "only incidentally, but not required by this spec"
from what I've seen.

We should be starting the other way around, IMHO where we're defining the hypermedia
context for services, and let implementers work out their own rules for the URI
for this image or that coverage.  Note that hypermedia can be quite sophisticated,
with standards-based URI Templates [1]

Cheers,
Peter

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6570