Re: PURLs of wisdom

I can't help but see a lot of LSID-precedent wisdom in these "Active  
PURLS"...

;-)  8-)

Mark


On Fri, 30 May 2008 08:36:48 -0700, eric neumann <ekneumann@gmail.com>  
wrote:

> While attending Semtech 2008 I was impressed with a number of  
> interesting SW
> talks. One in particular is worth mentioning to the HCLSIG community
> regarding the roadmap to semanticizing data from authoritative sources.  
> This
> applies to data from sources such as NCBI and EBI (Uniprot has taken the
> lead to help make this happen-- thank you!). In the URI note [1], for
> instance, one possible idea is to use purl URIs to reference  
> data/metadata
> from NCBI that has been converted into RDF.
> Even though PURLs offer re-direction (even when NCBI finally publishes  
> its
> own RDF), the URI would remain as purl.org/../ncbi/entrez-23111. Some of  
> us
> find this troubling, since most users of such data would expect the URI  
> to
> state clearly it comes from http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov or
> http://ebi.ac.uk/. Some of you know this has been a long (and
> difficult) discussion, and we
> still have no clear proposal of how to do this. And here is where we have
> lost momentum-- no clear path forward that most of us would be happy  
> with...
> Enter Active Purls: In Eric Miller's SemTech session on "PURLZ", he
> described a new model for PURLs coming out this summer called Active  
> PURLs.
> These PURLS are associated with services that are defined the source. I
> asked him about one specific service: if one starts with a PURL URI to
> Entrez data converted to RDF by (let's say) the HCLS community, can one
> include a service to say that if NCBI now has created its own RDF Entrez
> version with URI, that the PURL should be permanently re-directed to the
> NCBI location? In other words, can one ask a bunch of PURLs "what are  
> your
> direct, and permanent URIs to the authoritative source?" Eric's reply  
> seems
> to suggest this is quite easy to set up..
>
> SO what is gained? Well if you have a large KB with lots of  
> purl.org//ncbi/...
> records, there would be now a mechanism to replace all these wholesale to
> the new NCBI URIs. In other words, a global replace of older initial  
> PURLs
> to proper URIs from authoritative spaces. This seems to make a lot of  
> life
> science folks asking how to begin working with SW and URIs happy-- a  
> clean
> and basic transition model can be offered to the community for getting
> started with SW via Active PURLS.
>
> I would like to propose we plan to include this as a topic for the next  
> HCLS
> TC in the coming weeks. Perhaps we can even ask Eric M to speak about  
> this,
> and see if this indeed can help our efforts move forwards!
>
> cheers,
> Eric
>
>
> 1 - http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/notes/uris/



-- 
Mark D Wilkinson, PI Bioinformatics
Assistant Professor, Medical Genetics
The James Hogg iCAPTURE Centre for Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Research
Providence Heart + Lung Institute
University of British Columbia - St. Paul's Hospital
Vancouver, BC, Canada

Received on Friday, 30 May 2008 15:50:47 UTC