RE: URIs for NCBI data + relevance to proposed URI Resolution ontology

> From: Eric Neumann [mailto:eneumann@teranode.com]
> To: Kwan, Kathy (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E]
> 	       
> Kathy,
> 	       
> Yes, we are leaning towards a URL "http" 
> identifier, thus requiring no additional urn (lsid) 
> resolution mechanism.

Great!  And as a reminder, if a resource owner also wants to offer the
resolution functionality that LSIDs provide, then the owner could still
do that using a special purpose http URI prefix[1], such as
http://entrez.example/2007/lsid: .  So for a URI like

 
http://entrez.example/2007/lsid:authority:namespace:identifier:revision

a naive client dereferencing the URI would thus use HTTP, but an
LSID-aware client might access the data using an LSID-aware proxy, which
would:

	- recognize the http://entrez.example/2007/lsid: prefix; 

	- convert it to urn:lsid:  and

	- resolve the result using LSID resolution.

Of course, the proxy would not need to be hard-coded to recognize the
prefix.  It could merely read some string pattern matching rules (or an
ontology) to map http://entrez.example/2007/lsid: URIs to urn:lsid:
URIs.

Furthermore, the resource metadata returned when the http URI is naively
dereferenced using HTTP could include a pointer to the URI pattern
matching rules (or an ontology), so that an LSID-aware proxy that did
not previouly recognize the http://entrez.example/2007/lsid:  prefix
could be automatically bootstrapped to learn of its special meaning.

Reference
1. http://dbooth.org/2006/urn2http/

David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
dbooth@hp.com
Phone: +1 617 629 8881
 

Received on Monday, 26 February 2007 20:14:21 UTC