Let's say you have a resource that you can do normal PUT/POST/GET operations on. It represents a BLOB of data and the methods retrieve representations of the data, be they metadata about the BLOB or the BLOB itself.

The resource is something that can be processed by the server on request. In this instance a file that can be parsed multiple times.

How do I initiate that processing? It's a bit RPC like. Is there best practice around this?

(First time on programmers. This is the right place for this sort of question, right?)