[topicmapmail] Should resourceData have a MIME type?

[Nikita Ogievetsky]

Thomas wrote:
> [Nikita Ogievetsky]>
> > Thinking about this issue again I must say that neither occurrence type,
> nor
> > scope, nor variant (which is not there yet) are the proper syntactical
> > places
> > for expressing resourceData MIME type.
> > I am saying this because all off the above allow expressing properties
of
> > occurrence assertion. And MIME type is the property of the resource
> itself,
> > not occurrence!
>
> Exactly my point!  I am talking about using it **only** for resourceData,
> not for resourceRef.

Oops! Tom, By occurrence I did not mean resourceRef ... I meant occurrence
:-)
Topic Maps occurrence represents assertion between a topic and a resource.
resourceRef - is for remote resources and resourceData - is for inline
resources.
MIME type is the property of a resource, not of an assertion about that
resource.
Your MIME attribute meats this criteria because you placed it on the
resourceData
element, but you may want to put it on the resourceRef as well, especially
if it
is not addressed via HTTP (as you are rightly explaining ), and even if it
is.
Then I said that there is no urgency to do so as you can use association
between reified
resources and a MIME type. And the proposed attribute is a syntactical
shortcut (sugar)
for doing so and will lead to the same graph representation (via RM).
And Kal proposed "resource-has-media-type" association class for this.

> The addressable resources should (theoretically) come
> with their own types.  With HTTP, there should be a MIME type header.
With
> FTP, everyone is used to guessing and there are algorithms for doing so.
> But the resourceData is not coming from some resource, it is just
characters
> in the occurrence.  That is why it makes all kinds of sense to add a MIME
> type to resourceData, which it would have if it came from (for example)
from
> a web server as a resourceRef instead of from the topic map as
> resoureceData.
>
> As for resourceRef, I agree, the type of representation of the resource is
> up to the server and might change from time to time.  Therefore applying a
> media type indicator would not make sense for a resourceRef.

Not always, and how about FTP and local file system, etc.?

All the best,

--Nikita.

Nikita Ogievetsky, nogievet@cogx.com;
Cogitech Inc.        http://www.cogx.com
Topic Maps Tutorials and Consulting.
phone:  1 (917) 406 - 8734