Re: Question on "moving" linked data sets

Hi Antoine,

First, congratulations on http://data.bnf.fr/ that is a major milestone!

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:23 AM, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote:
> 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?

As you know when the SKOS concepts published at lcsh.info moved to
id.loc.gov I had a similar situation :-) Like you I chose to do a
mixture of technical and social things:

- publish information about the move to relevant discussion lists
- put some information up at lcsh.info about the move
- permanently redirect (301) all resources to their new location (easy
since it was the same app, and mod_rewrite could do it)
- after a year of redirects I shut down lcsh.info and did not renew
the domain (interestingly someone is squatting on it right now
attempting to sell it, I think)

Generally I think the linked data community should be encouraged to
check their links, respect 301 redirects, and update their own link
database appropriately. This is what Google and other major search
engines do [1], and it's how the Web was designed to work, and
continues to grow.

While it's certainly cool when URIs don't change [1] I think it is
somewhat irrational to expect URIs to be "permanent". I hear people
gripe about broken URLs in the digital preservation community quite a
bit and it is pretty irritating, since any data that isn't actively
used tends to rot...URLs really aren't that different.

Of course there is certainly value in stable identifiers [1], but I
think there is an opportunity for documenting and encouraging best
practices on how to manage change (especially with respect to
identifiers) in Linked Data. URNs, Namespaces and Registries [2] is
partly helpful here, but a more succinct and URI focused presentation
is needed. Or maybe a best practice document like this already exists
and I haven't seen it yet. If that is the case I trust someone will
let me know :-)

//Ed

[1] http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/URNsAndRegistries-50

Received on Thursday, 19 April 2012 17:07:48 UTC