Re: [dxwg] Profile negotiation [RPFN]

The practical reason is that without profile negotiation, a client wanting
a particular representation of a thing A must be able to find, interpret
and act on canonical metadata about what representations are. this is a
huge leap and barrier.

If you think about this a bit deeper the alternative is actually worse -
everyone publishing data and wanting to cite A, but only having options of
URLS of representations b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k... and unknown future
representations needs to continually maintain their data to have all the
links, or know what all the clients might want, and embed qualification
metadata  (i.e all the content and mechanisms of the "alternates" view Nick
was talking about, embedded in every resource.

In  a nutshell, we don't have a "Web of Data" or a "Semantic Web" of any
great depth relative the amount of "data on the web" partly because this is
currently broken. We can provide two canonical mechanisms to help -
negotiation and description of how profile-conformant resources relate. It
may not solve the problem but it addresses a major barrier.




On Tue, 5 Jun 2018 at 05:06 Annette Greiner <amgreiner@lbl.gov> wrote:

> Sorry, but I need an answer that is not tautological.
>
> I imagine the IETF will be asking the same question. Why do you think
> you need to enable this type of negotiation versus allowing discovery
> via links? Clients can get from one representation to another by
> following links (either in a browser or in an API). That is plenty
> webby. Why is automated discovery needed? There are plenty of
> differentiating features of web data resources that a user could want;
> why make this particular level of differentiation negotiated? Do you
> have a real need to require profile creators to register their profiles
> with IETF? This is more work for IETF and for profile creators. (If you
> have a way around that, it would help to hear it.)
>
> Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to shut down discussion of profile
> negotiation. I'm trying to stimulate the production of actual use cases
> that can guide the generation of realistic requirements. Reiterating the
> solution doesn't address that.
>
> -Annette
>
>
> On 6/1/18 11:28 PM, Ruben Verborgh via GitHub wrote:
> >> I'm talking about the motivation to use negotiation.
> >
> > Negotiation is what gets clients to the representation with the
> > preferred profile.
> >
> >> If the only motivation is to have the same resource available in
> >> conformance to different profiles
> >
> > No, that's not the motivation. We can do that with existing
> > technologies already.
> >
> > What existing technologies don't do, is automatically getting a
> > resource in a profile the client understands.
> >
> >> I don't see any particular reason to have profile negotiation that
> >> works like content negotiation.
> >
> > It's just like negotiating between XML or JSON, except more fine-grained:
> > https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/fine-grained-content-negotiation/
> >
> >> Having multiple profiles available is realized already by just
> >> offering a version of the dataset that conforms to one profile under
> >> one URL and a version that applies to another under another URL.
> >
> > But how does the client get from one to the other?
> > Our answer: content negotiation.
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
> Annette Greiner
> NERSC Data and Analytics Services
> Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
>
>
>