Fulfilling the Hypermedia Constraint via HTTP OPTIONS, the HTTP Vocabulary in RDF, and Link Headers

One of the main REST design principles is the focus on media types as the core of contracts on the Web. However, not always is the service designer free to select the most appropriate media type for a task, sometimes a generic media type like application/rdf+xml (or in the worst case a binary format like image/png) with no defined or possible hypermedia controls at all has to be chosen. With this position paper we present a way how the hypermedia constraint of REST can still be fulfilled using a combination of Link headers, the OPTIONS method, and the HTTP Vocabulary in RDF.