Re: Best practice for permantently moved resources?

I realize this is a dangerous question, but...what is the cause of the change?

* Has the "content" actually changed (revision), or simply moved (URI change)?
* Must the content at the "old" URI go away, or can it be represented
as a previous version?

All of this is useful knowledge --- a form of provenance --- and
should not be lost. The question is, how to handle it systematically
and efficiently...

This brings to mind a number of conversations I've had in the
DOI/Handle System alternate reality, in which we've discussed a
vocabulary of types (think: predicates) that could serve as hints to a
HS proxy on what "physical" URI to return to a resolution request,
including and especially as a "smart" way to handle conneg. Not only
could these type assertions help the proxy distinguish between data
vs. document, but it could nicely handle version ala Memento
<http://mementoweb.org/>

My point is not to harp on the Handle System, instead to point out
that the HS (architecturally) builds-in the kind of encapsulation that
can facilitate this --- although the type-based conneg I'm referring
to has only been seriously considered in the past few months (AFAIK).

John

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:12 AM, Kjetil Kjernsmo <kjetil@kjernsmo.net> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> Cool URIs don't change, but cool content does, so the problem surfaces that I
> need to permanently redirect now and then. I discussed this problem in a
> meetup yesterday, and it turns out that people have found dbpedia problematic
> to use because it is too much of a moving target, when a URI changes because
> the underlying concepts change, there's a need for more 301s.
>
> The problem is then that I need to record the relation between the old and the
> new URI somehow. As of now, it seems that the easiest way to do this would be
> to do something like:
>
> <http://example.org/old> ex:permanently_moved_to <http://example.org/new>
>
> and if the former is dereferenced, the server will 301 redirect to the latter.
> Has anyone done something like that, or have other useful experiences relevant
> to this problem?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kjetil
>
>



-- 
John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
http://bitwacker.wordpress.com
olyerickson@gmail.com
Twitter: @olyerickson
Skype: @olyerickson

Received on Thursday, 12 August 2010 11:36:01 UTC