Question on "moving" linked data sets

Dear all,

We have a question on an what to do when a linked data set is "moved" from one namespace to the other. We searched for recipes to apply, but did not really find anything 'official'  around...
  
The VU university of Amsterdam has published a Linked Data SKOS representation of RAMEAU [1] as a prototype, several years ago. For example we have
http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/vocabularies/rameau/ark:/12148/cb14521343b

Recently, BnF implemented its own production service for RAMEAU. The previous concept is at:
http://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb14521343b
(see RDF at http://data.bnf.fr/14521343/web_semantique/rdf.xml)

The production services makes the prototype obsolete. Our issue is how to properly "transition" from one to the other. Several services are using the URIs of the prototype. For example at the Library of Congress:
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2002000569

We can ask for the people we know to change their links. But identifying the users of URIs seems too manual, error-prone a process. And of course in general we do not want links to be broken.

Currently we have done the following:

- a 301 "moved permanently" redirection from the stitch.cs.vu.nl/rameau prototype to data.bnf.fr.

- an owl:sameAs statement between the prototype URIs and the production ones, so that a client searching for data on the old URI gets data that enables it to make the connection with the original resource (URI) it was seeking data about.

Does that seem ok? What should we do, otherwise?

Thanks for any feedback you could have,

Antoine Isaac (VU Amsterdam side)
Romain Wenz (BnF side)

[1] RAMEAU is a vocabulary (thesaurus) used by the National Library of France (BnF) for describing books.

Received on Thursday, 19 April 2012 14:23:47 UTC