VCoRE: a web resource oriented architecture for efficient data exchange

In this paper, we present a specification of a RESTful based networking interface for the efficient exchange and manipulation of visual computing resources. It is designed to include web applications by using modern web-technology such as Typed Arrays and WebSockets. The specification maps internal structures and data containers to two types, Elements and Attributes, which can be queried for a description or their content. Two modes of communication are defined, one through HTTP requests, where we use HTTP operations to manipulate Elements and Attributes or request their data in a stateless fashion, the other through WebSockets to enable a push-based communication. A key idea to this interface is that we use MIME types to specify the way data is to be exchanged in. When requesting data, the user may supply a hint or type in which the data is expected to be delivered in, which enables us to write web-applications which can process already converted data that would not have been web-friendly before. To have such a mode of operation, we also present a table of extracted basic data types usable for requesting data conversion, which are derived from the Typed Array specification and shared across shader languages.