Content negotiation on the Web: State of the art

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of content negotiation on the Web, highlighting its challenges, current solutions, and future research directions to improve resource representation matching.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed state of the art analysis, classifies existing approaches, and identifies gaps and future research directions in content negotiation.

Findings

Content negotiation is complex and not fully solved.

Existing approaches vary in styles and means of conveying constraints.

Significant research gaps remain in addressing diverse use cases.

Abstract

The openness and accessibility of the Web has contributed greatly to its worldwide adoption. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are used for resource identification on the Web. A resource on the Web can be described in many ways, which makes it difficult for a user to find an adequate representation. This situation has motivated fruitful research on content negotiation to satisfy user requirements efficiently and effectively. We focus on the important topic of content negotiation, and our goal is to present the first comprehensive state of the art. Our contributions include (1) identifying the characteristics of content negotiation scenarios (styles, dimensions, and means of conveying constraints), (2) comparing and classifying existing contributions, (3) identifying use cases that the current state of content negotiation struggles to address, (4) suggesting research directions for future work. The results of the state of the art show that the problem of content negotiation is relevant and far from being solved.