Apache Content Negotiation for CEUR-WS

[WolfgangFahl]

https://ceur-ws.wikidata.dbis.rwth-aachen.de is a mirror of https://ceur-ws.org

Setup

Virtual host ceur-ws.wikidata.dbis.rwth-aachen.de serves static files from
/hd/mantax/ceur-ws/www with MultiViews enabled.

Config: /etc/apache2/sites-available/ceur-ws.conf

<Directory /hd/mantax/ceur-ws/www>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
</Directory>

How it works

Apache's mod_negotiation with MultiViews allows clients to request a resource
without a file extension. Apache selects the best matching file based on the
client's Accept: header.

For example, /Vol-3480/paper-01 can resolve to any of:

File	Content-Type
paper-01.pdf	application/pdf
paper-01.tei.xml	application/xml
paper-01.cermine.xml	application/xml
paper-01-content.txt	text/plain

Verified examples

Default (no Accept header) → resolves to TEI XML:

curl -I https://ceur-ws.wikidata.dbis.rwth-aachen.de/Vol-3480/paper-01
# Content-Location: paper-01.tei.xml
# Content-Type: application/xml

With Accept: application/pdf → resolves to PDF:

curl -I -H "Accept: application/pdf" \
  https://ceur-ws.wikidata.dbis.rwth-aachen.de/Vol-3480/paper-01
# Content-Location: paper-01.pdf
# Content-Type: application/pdf

The response includes Vary: negotiate,accept and TCN: choice headers,
confirming transparent content negotiation is active.

[WolfgangFahl]

date;find . -name "*.cermine.xml" | wc -l
Wed Apr 15 07:30:09 PM CEST 2026
76871
wf@wikidata:/hd/mantax/ceur-ws/www$ date;find . -name "*.cermine.xml" | wc -l
Wed Apr 15 08:04:58 PM CEST 2026
77237
date;find . -name "*.cermine.xml" | wc -l
Thu Apr 16 06:19:57 AM CEST 2026
81790

[kochm]

nginx does not offer a good way to do content negotiation. However, in my opinion this is not really needed since we have the metadata in index.jsonld in the volume directories - and these files are served with the correct mime type. Check https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4294/index.jsonld