ACTION-104 Some text on URI persistence

Bernadette,

I'm trying to close off all my open actions and, with this mail, I can 
do so :-)

I'd like to have spent longer on this than I have but looking at section 
9 I offer this slightly longer text:

URI persistence is a matter of policy and commitment on the part of the 
URI owner. Such commitments need to be made publicly and be credible if 
users of those URIs are to have confidence in them. URIs that are 
persistent need to be carefully designed and published in an environment 
that can be managed independently so that should the original publisher 
cease to support the service for whatever reason, another organization 
can take over.

The choice of a particular URI scheme itself provides no guarantee that 
those URIs will be persistent or that they will not be persistent. 
However, HTTP [RFC2616] has been designed to help manage URI 
persistence. For example, HTTP redirection (using the 3xx response 
codes) permits servers to tell an agent that further action needs to be 
taken by the agent in order to fulfill the request (for example, a new 
URI is associated with the resource).

In addition, content negotiation also promotes consistency, as a site 
manager is not required to define new URIs when adding support for a new 
format specification. Protocols that do not support content negotiation 
(such as FTP) require a new identifier when a new data format is 
introduced. Improper use of content negotiation can lead to inconsistent 
representations.

A survey was conducted on behalf of the European Commission in 2012 and 
offers 12 examples of persistent URI management and one counter example.


The last sentence there refers to a study for which I was mostly but not 
entirely, responsible. It's formally published by the EC at 
http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/D7.1.3%20-%20Study%20on%20persistent%20URIs_0.pdf 
but, well, I wanted to have a Web version with a persistence policy so I 
copied it to http://philarcher.org/diary/2013/uripersistence/ which of 
course is subject to http://philarcher.org/policy/

If you want to link to either I leave the choice to you...

HTH

Phil.


-- 


Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Thursday, 23 May 2013 14:02:25 UTC