Content negotiation, and beyond

I had in the past, and for many years, looked at content negotiation with no particular attention, as just one among those hundreds of technical goodies developed to make the Web more user-friendly, along with javascript, ajax, cookies etc. When the httpRange-14 solution proposed by the TAG in 2006 was based on content negotiation, I was among those quite unhappy to see this deep and quasi-metaphysical issue solved by such a technical twist, but three months later I eventually came to some better view of it. Not only content negotiation was indeed the way to go, but this decision can be seen now as a small piece in a much bigger picture.

Content negociation has become so pervasive we don't even notice it any more. Even if a URI is supposed to have a permanent referent, what I GET when I submit that URI through a protocol is dependent on a growing number of parameters of the client-server conversation : traditional parameters pushed by the client are language preference, required mime type (the latter being used for the httpRange-14 solution), localisation, various cookies, and user login. Look at how http://google.com/+BernardVatant works. This URI is a reference for me on the Web (at least it's the one I give those days to people wanting a reference), but the representation it yields will depend on the user asking it : anonymous request, someone being logged on G+ but not in my circles, someone in my circles (and depending on which), someone having me in her circles etc, and of course of the interface (mobile, computer). This will look also differently if I call this URI indirectly from another page, like in a snippet etc.  

This kind of behavior will be tomorrow the rule. Every call to any entity through its URI will result in a chain of operations leading to a different conversation. And not only for profiles in social networks, not only for people, alive or dead, but for every entity on the web : places, products, events, concepts ... 

Imagine the following scenario applied to a VIAF URI for example. VIAF stores various representations of the same authority, names in various languages, preferred and alternative labels for the matching authority in a given library. I can easily imagine a customized acces to VIAF, where I could set my preferences such as my favourite library or vendor, with default values based on my geolocation (as already today in WorldCat) and/or user experience, parameters for selection of works (such as a period in time, only new stuff, only novels ...). The search on a name in VIAF would lead to a disambiguation interface if needed, and once the entity selected, to a customized representation of the resource identified under the hood.

This kind of customized content negotiation will not necessarily be provided by the original owner of the URI. In fact there certainly are a lot of sustainable business models around such services which would run on top of existing linked data. A temporal service would extract for any entity a time line of events involving this entity, e.g., events in the life of a person or enterprise, or various translations and adaptations of a book, life cycle of a product ... A geographical service would show the locations attached to an entity, like distribution of offices of a company or its organisational structure. And certainly the most popular way to interact with the entity will be to engage in the conversation with it, as we engage in conversation with people. In both pull and push mode. I would not say like Dominiek ter Heide that the Semantic Web has failed. But I agree it could. Things on the Web of Data have to go dynamic, join the global conversation, or die of obsolescence.