Decide on an Item <-> Asset linking structure.

[lossyrob]

At the end of the Boulder Sprint, we came up with a number of ideas for linking together Assets and Items. We need to finalize that linking concept and codify it into the spec.

[lossyrob]

One idea is what was present in the diagram below, and was codified in the NAIP example hacked together at the Boulder Sprint:

• Items contain links. Links are an object that contains at least a rel and an href property.
• The rel describes the relationship of the link to the current Item.
• The href points to either an Item JSON, an Asset JSON, or the bare asset itself (e.g. a GeoTiff).
• rel=asset links can have additional properties that describe the asset, such as format or product. These would be inlining the Asset json directly into the link, in which case the href points directly to the asset file.

In this way, we can have links handle both assets and other links (such as thumbnails). Thoughts?

[lossyrob]

Proposal described here and here

[cholmes]

Closing this, decision was made to not get too crazy with items that only contain assets and not other metadata. Though there likely are some good use cases to model things in Item hierarchy more. But it's not the core recommendation at this moment.