- From: Christopher St John <ckstjohn@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 15:14:54 -0500
- To: public-lod@w3.org
On a vaguely similar topic as the .htaccess discussion, I ran into a problem using a third party service to host some triples. I want my URLs to be "pretty", and based on a domain that I control. Something like: http://nrhpdata.daytripr.com/site/72001552 (which describes a United States National Register of Historic Places site.) But when hosting at Talis[1] (or anywhere but nrhpdata.daytripr.com) I end up with something like: http://api.talis.com/stores/ckstjohn-dev1/meta?about=http://nrhpdata.daytripr.com/site/72001552 Having to think about hosting when coming up with a URL scheme is distracting, but necessary if you ever plan on dereferencing your URIs. Using purl (more or less[2]) forces you to use the purl.org domain, which wasn't acceptable (I hesitate to mint URLs under domains I don't have administrative control over) So I wrote a quick redirector service that uses the HTTP host header to index into a regex/template pair map: hostname: nrhpdata.daytripr.com pattern: http://nrhpdata.daytripr.com/site/([^/]*) template: http://api.talis.com/stores/ckstjohn-dev1/meta?about=http://nrhpdata.daytripr.com/site/{1} And then 303's the resulting URL. For that to work, I had to CNAME nrhpdata.daytripr.com over to the redirector service host, but by following the mint-in-a-domain- you-control rule I'm able to do that without much trouble (and switch it someplace else when I eventually move the data) I've found it useful, since it lets me come up with a clean URL scheme and get something up and running faster than I could if I had to worry about hosting all the data immediately. I wrote it to be generic[3] and will definitely use it to get some other projects off the ground quickly, but I was curious if anyone else would find it useful. -cks [1] I'll eventually apply for a Talis Connected Commons account to host the data, it's all government stuff, but for experimentation the dev account is convenient. [2] If you apply for a top-level namespace you can kinda sorta get the same effect by CNAME-ing over, but that assumes you can get permission, and the rest of the URL has to match exactly. [3] http://uridirector.praxisbridge.org/redir/register, feel free to play around, but the service is unstable at the moment and I'm probably going to be flushing the database a few more times before it's ready for real use. -- Christopher St. John http://praxisbridge.com
Received on Tuesday, 7 July 2009 20:15:34 UTC