[Esip-discovery] summary of OGC meeting

[Mattmann, Chris A (388J)]

Hi Chris,

On Dec 13, 2011, at 1:38 PM, Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102) wrote:

> Well, my note-taking deteriorated halfway in, so I'm going to try to just summarize the key points of difficulty:
> 
> (1) The addition of namespace-specific attributes (e.g., esip:subrel) is problematic because mass-market tools (e.g., Firefox, OpenLayers) will not understand them and have little motivation for changing to understand them.
> 
> (2) If we confine ourselves to the IANA names, then data service protocols like OPeNDAP present a problem because they can present the data in a number of forms. This leaves only the mime-type to work with as a standard attribute.
> 
> (3) There may be some way of working out these options at the <entry> level, but we need an example to demonstrate how this might be done.
> 
> (4) Alternatively, perhaps we could put enough information in the mime-type using the '+'.  Following the Open Search Description Document, which is "application/opensearchdescription+xml", we would have, e.g., "application/opendap+x-netcdf".

Speaking from the Apache Tika [1] perspective, and from the perspective of other libraries and toolkits that detect
document formats and descriptions and so forth, relying on IANA, and MIME, and MIME extension (the x- or +)
would sure make it easier in our MIME detection system and improve our overall ability to parse content.

Solely for this reason, I'd VOTE for #4.

Cheers,
Chris

[1] http://tika.apache.org/

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Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Senior Computer Scientist
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA
Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246
Email: chris.a.mattmann at nasa.gov
WWW:   http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/
Phone: +1 (818) 354-8810
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Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA
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