Consider inline embedded media data in the JSON data file

[markboots]

The first version of the spec stores media data (image, audio, video) simply as a URL to an external resource.

[ "2017-05-23T17:25:12-04:00", 20394823956, 923842093, "ae54da", "https://myexampleflowserver.org/resources/audio/20394823956.ogg", {"type": "audio", "language": "eng", "format": "audio/ogg"} ],

Is it valuable to allow embedding the media for any of these question types within the JSON data file? One possibility is to allow a base-64 encoded string in place of the URL, and a response metadata indicating "inline":1, "format":"audio/ogg", "extension":".ogg"

This allows reducing external dependencies, at the expense of large data file sizes, and the requirement to support two code paths.

[pld]

It might not be frequently used, but when sharing files for analysis an optional base64 embedding of media files would be very valuable for share and transferring data.

One use case I can think of is a recent waterpoint dataset where we had to download the CSV data file, download the images separately, then preprocess to identify and split the media files based on the values of a binary column in the text file. Eventually, I'd want all those steps to exist in an API, it would be a lot easier to send a single file with embedded media files to an API than a text file, compressed image file, and preprocessing instructions. Additionally, for sharing with other machine learning researchers (in combination with a notebook file) a single file would be quite convenient.

[nicpottier]

No denying there is something appealing about having a single file that is guaranteed to be complete. Seems like supporting this as an optional thing would be useful for say one-time batch exports where the result could be zipped in the end (removing most of the downsides of base64 encoding). For actually sending stuff over APIs I would think this is an antipattern just because these will quickly grow into payloads that are impractical to transfer in a single request.

[pld]

Definitely when something running in production you want to push models to the data, but for things I'm doing now exploring different modeling approaches, and sharing notebooks that hook-up to APIs, this would be super useful for me (I'm using requests w/limits on the number of rows so size is bounded)​

[ggiraldez]

I think this is a nice to have, but should definitely be optional, and consumer configurable via a parameter.

Also, since we already have two separate "files" (ie. schema and response data) I'd assume we might want to package both in some way, eg. a .zip file. @pld what about embedding the images in the zip file? Would that still work for your use case?

[pld]

Yea, a zip file is how we're doing it now and it works, just not as convenient

On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 10:26 AM, Gustavo Giráldez <notifications@github.com

wrote:

I think this is a nice to have, but should definitely be optional, and consumer configurable via a parameter.

Also, since we already have two separate "files" (ie. schema and response data) I'd assume we might want to package both in some way, eg. a .zip file. @pld https://github.com/pld what about embedding the images in the zip file? Would that still work for your use case?

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