How to refer to media types within ZIP files? Switch to the latest release

Published on: 28/03/2017 Last update: 08/11/2017

Issue

Implementers do not have the possibility to provide information about the format of files (dcat:mediaType) within a package (e.g. ZIP file).

The discussion on the issue is available here.

Current situation

dcat:mediaType refers to the media type of the Distribution as defined in the official register of media types (MIME) managed by IANA.

Recommendation

The recommendation proposed by IETF should be followed, as to know to add ‘+zip’ as suffix in the structured syntax to the IANA registry for media types and for files within a ZIP package. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6839#section-3.6

Rationale

The suggested approach provides a basic, standards-based solution for simple cases. The current guideline does not specify the compression type e.g. gzip or how the media type should be expressed in the case of application/ld+json.

Example

In the IANA registry, a text file in CSV format will have the following syntax structure: text/csv. In the case of a ZIP package, the syntax would become: text/csv+zip.