Re: Requesting the RDF MIME type of an image

Dear all,

This is indeed an interesting discussion that reminds the presentation I 
did earlier this year at the Second Linked Data on the Web Workshop 
collocated with the WWW 2009 conference.

Have a look at the slide 11 at 
http://www.slideshare.net/troncy/interlinking-multimedia-how-to-apply-linked-data-principles-to-multimedia-fragments-ldow09 
which exactly summarizes the problem. Where should we stop for 
conneg-ing between two representations of a resource? Is conneg-ing 
between an rdf+xml and video/* a behavior we should accept or ban? Are 
an image and its ASCII version close enough to be content negotiated? 
Are an image and a transcoded version close enough to be content 
negotiated even if they do not share a single common bytes?

We had a conversation with Tim Berners Lee during this workshop that 
pretty much agrees with what Toby just wrote below ... while I was 
arguing than nobody has formally defined what is the 'sameness' of two 
representations of a resource. The accessibility community has defined 
the notion of "equivalent" when the two representations both fulfill the 
same function or purpose upon presentation to the user, and in an 
accessibility context, it is fine to say that a text is another 
representation of an audio resource ...

>> Perhaps:
>>
>>  GET /images/example HTTP/1.1
>>  Accept: image/png, image/jpeg, image/*;q=0.5
>>
>> should return the JPEG, but:
>>
>>  GET /images/example HTTP/1.1
>>  Accept: application/rdf+xml
>>
>> should return a 303 See Other to a different URL (e.g.
>> </data/images/example> or </images/example;about>) which would provide
>> an RDF description of the image.
> 
> Although I would tend to agree with Toby on this, I keep thinking both
> options (303 or 200 for the RDF version) are valid.
> 
> After all, the pixel matrix conveyed by the JPEG encoding is also a
> *representation* of a more abstract resource that we call an image (the
> same *image* could be represented by a slightly different matrix using
> another encoding, another color scheme, another resolution...).
> 
> So why would the JPEG representation be more *intrinsic* to the image
> than the RDF representation. What if the RDF representation contained a
> property
>   :hasPixelGrid 'A65E8F9B87X78964...'
> ?
> 
> This is hair splitting, but I think it is worth questionning the
> distinction between informational and non informational resources. This
> distinction is often taken for granted, and I think it is often not as
> clear as it seems...

I agree. And I would also point out to a question post on the TAG 
mailing list [1] before the summer which unfortunately hasn't received 
many answers.
Best regards.

   Raphaël

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2009Jun/0180.html

-- 
Raphaël Troncy
EURECOM, Multimedia Communications Department
2229, route des Crêtes, 06560 Sophia Antipolis, France.
e-mail: raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr & raphael.troncy@gmail.com
Tel: +33 (0)4 - 9300 8242
Fax: +33 (0)4 - 9000 8200
Web: http://www.eurecom.fr/~troncy/

Received on Monday, 26 October 2009 22:07:45 UTC