Donald writes:
I worry however that, even if we deprecate URLs like http://www.my.org/entomology/tomcat/display.jsp?catno=12345 in favour of something more like http://my.org/stable-id/entomologycollection/12345, we are left with the following problems:
- my.org still needs to step up to the long-term responsibility to handle URL rewriting for these ids.
- my.org still needs to return data in a standard agreed form (e.g. RDF or OWL) when requested from these URLs.
On 1: I think it would be a great community service, to provide
stable-id.gbif.net/my.org/entomologycollection/12345 for those having problems meeting the technical or management demands.
On 2: Why should we limit ourselves to web technologies of the very early 21st century?
Seriously, I believe the system of content negotation is much more flexible than the fixed LSID system (which though not fixed per se to RDF, requires a global agreement). With standard content negotiation web technology a provider can migrate to newer standards later on, but still honor requests for xml/rdf type. And without any effort, the same URL can provide human readable content in a format desired by the provider.
Gregor