A resource is an abstract concept that is made concrete by a representation, which is a data object encoded in an octet-stream. For example, a DICOM Study (abstract) might be represented by a sequence of octets encoded in a selected Media Type. See Section 8.7.3.

A media type describes the format or encoding of a representation. Examples of media types are application/dicom, application/dicom+json, image/jpeg, and text/html.