Thumbnails

[David Caruana <david.caruana@alfresco.com>]

At the last Face 2 Face there was interest in supporting document  
thumbnails.

For AtomPub there are some initiatives for representing media content  
within feeds, although none seem to be widely accepted. Two that stick  
out for me...

1) Media RSS - http://search.yahoo.com/mrss - as the name implies,  
originally developed for RSS, but due to Atom's extensibility, may  
also be embedded in Atom. In summary, this initiative is comprehensive  
(or complex depending on your point of view), although ambiguous in  
places. The main use-case, I believe, is to drive Yahoo! video search.  
Google also use in their Data API.

2) Atom Media- http://www.apparently.me.uk/22448.html - an initiative  
to provide an Atom specific simplified alternative of Media RSS.  
Basically, extends Atom link='enclosure' and introduces  
link='preview', specifically for reduced fidelity representations such  
as thumbnails.

I haven't seen any equivalent in the SOAP world.

There are two approaches we can take to introducing thumbnails into  
CMIS.

a) Leverage a complementary initiative that specifically supports  
thumbnails (like the above) - no winner here, and perhaps lacking in  
SOAP.

b) Introduce the notion of thumbnail into the CMIS data model and  
provide explicit supporting services (e.g. hook into getContentStream,  
or support multiple content streams) - simple, concise, but not  
necessarily compatible with broader non-ECM use cases.

I'd be interested to hear what others think about introducing  
thumbnails.

Regards,
Dave