Content Negotiation by Profile First Public Working Draft - Request for Comment

Dear DXWG Public Comments list,

The W3C's Dataset eXchange Working Group (DXWG) [1] is chartered to provide a guidance document on publishing application profiles of vocabularies and a recommendation for content negotiation by application profile. The WG has published a First Public Working Draft of the latter, titled Content Negotiation by Profile [2]. That document describes how Internet clients may negotiate for content provided by servers according to profiles. Note that it is an extension to the Internet Engineering Taskforce Internet Draft submission "Negotiating Profiles in HTTP" [3]. A more complete description of the document is below.

We would greatly appreciate your feedback on this document. In reviewing the draft, it might be helpful for you to keep in mind the "Use Cases and Requirements" document that we are working to [4]. We would find it most helpful to get feedback on the following lines:

  1.  Do you agree with the publication's overall intention to extend the ways profile negotiation may occur beyond just HTTP, as that is covered in [3]?
  2.  Are there any areas where we could improve what we have done? [please illustrate]
  3.  Are there any areas where you think the proposal/approach is wrong or could lead us into describing interactions that are unhelpful? [please give examples and reasons]

Please also feel free to make any other comments and suggestions regarding the draft. Note that positive comments or general assent to the work's design are very welcome, as these provide evidence of community acceptance. We would like to receive comments on this draft by early February 2019, so that they can inform our next working draft due in mid-Feb.

Please, send comments through GitHub issues (https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues - tag 'profile-negotiation') or through email at public-dxwg-comments@w3.org<mailto:public-dxwg-comments@w3.org>.

Thank you,

Nicholas, Lars & Rob (on behalf of the W3C DXWG)

[1] https://www.w3.org/2017/dxwg/charter
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/WD-dx-prof-conneg-20181218/
[3] https://profilenegotiation.github.io/I-D-Accept--Schema/I-D-accept-schema
[4] https://www.w3.org/TR/dcat-ucr/

Content Negotiation by Profile - description

This document describes how Internet clients may negotiate for content provided by servers according to profiles. This is distinct from negotiating by Media Type or Language: the profile is expected to specify the structure of the content of information returned, e. g. which RDF vocabularies or which XML elements are used. This may be a subset of the information the responding server has about the requested resource, and may be structured in a specific way to meet interoperability requirements of a community of practice.

Nicholas Car
Senior Experimental Scientist
CSIRO Land & Water
41 Boggo Road, Dutton Park, QLD 4102, Australia
E nicholas.car@csiro.au<mailto:nicholas.car@csiro.au> M 0477 560 177 P 07 3833 5632