I'm wondering whether there are libraries interested in helping with this. I read a lot of companies and emergent collectives in your description, Tom, but I wonder if persistence of metadata is in the wheelhouse of libraries and archives. Can we ask around?
joe
Joseph T. Tennis, PhD
Associate Professor and Director of Faculty Affairs
Information School
University of Washington
ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/jtennis
President
International Society for Knowledge Organization
isko.org
Chair, Governing Board
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
dublincore.org
________________________________________
From: DCMI Architecture Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Antoine Isaac <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2015 1:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The future of PURLs
Hi Tom,
Thanks a lot for the summary! This is very important, and probably something that the community should act upon. But concretely what could the wider community do?
Monica Omodei's message is very appropriate: OCLC or anyone in the future managing PURLs should get recognition and/or support. But I'm not sure we can forward the message as such as a call for action to our communities.
This may be especially true if OCLC and the community around PURLs are already thinking of some remedy actions. How to express constructive support while not interfering with the ongoing discussions?
Best,
Antoine
On 11/19/15 4:11 PM, Thomas Baker wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> The longevity of PURLs is key to the future of DCMI Metadata Terms because DCMI
> uses PURLs to identify all of its RDF properties and classes (e.g., [6]). With
> PURLs, the identifiers for DCMI metadata terms resolve to Web pages documenting
> the meaning of those terms. If the PURLs were to stop resolving, there would
> be no direct link between an identifier for a metadata term and its
> documentation.
>
> The purl.org server has recently experienced outages. Since late October, it
> has no longer been possible for DCMI (or anyone else) to log into the purl.org
> server to maintain its PURLs. According to the purl.org administrator at OCLC,
> the SOLR index on the purl.org site stopped updating, preventing effective
> maintenance, so the login mechanism has been turned off pending a solution.
>
> The future of the purl.org service at OCLC has recently become a topic of
> lively discussion on two mailing lists:
>
> 1) The PURLz mailing list on Google Groups, where issues related to PURLs are
> discussed [1], and specifically issues related to the PURLz software
> implementation of PURLs used by (among others) OCLC. OCLC points its users
> to this list.
>
> 2) The mailing list [2] for the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group [3].
> Much of the discussion there has revolved around w3id.org [4], a "secure,
> permanent URL re-direction service for Web applications" operated by the
> Community Group. The thread about PURLs on this list starts at [5].
>
> It has been proposed that the purl.org service be migrated to w3id.org
> -- a possibility to which OCLC is apparently receptive. See below for
> my summary of the discussion.
>
> Tom
>
> [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/persistenturls
> [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-perma-id/
> [3] https://www.w3.org/community/perma-id/
> [4] https://w3id.org/
> [5] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-perma-id/2015Nov/0003.html
> [6] http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator
> [7] https://github.com/dcmi/w3id.org (created an hour ago...)
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The idea behind the w3id.org site is to maintain .htaccess files (used
> to configure redirects on Apache Web servers) in a Github repository.
> Anyone can fork the w3id.org repository (e.g., [7]), create a directory
> for their organization, edit an .htaccess file and README.md, then issue
> a pull request to the w3id.org maintainers to have their redirects added
> to the main repository. The service is backed by a group of software
> companies who have pledged to maintain it as a service for the community
> and by a W3C community group.
>
> It has been proposed that PURLz group, and/or the operators of the w3id.org
> service, simply take over purl.org. Jeff Young at OCLC, currently the part-time
> administrator of purl.org, reportedly thinks this is a good idea. It was also
> reported that OCLC "seems willing" to provide the data from purl.org for the
> purposes of porting it to w3id.org -- if an acceptable plan were presented.
>
> Issues:
>
> -- Some people find the Github style of collaborative editing on w3id.org
> more congenial than the PURLz style of registering and managing maintainers.
> Others hate Github and argue that purl.org's existing users would need to
> have a more user-friendly interface. Dave Wood (one of the developers of
> PURLz) is looking into options.
>
> -- Github now serves RDF via gh-pages and has a decent workflow, https, mime
> types, file extensions and CORS (but no conneg). But there is some concern
> about dependence on Github. Will Github be around 18 years from now? It
> is however argued that with some effort, the w3id.org service could "fall
> back" to plain git.
>
> -- Someone suggested the possibility of writing a bot that would "back up"
> purl.org by trawling the purl.org service via the API and autogenerating
> a folder structure with .htaccess files under https://w3id.org/purl.org --
> a theoretical possibility of uncertain legality.
>
> Monica Omodei (Project Manager, Australian National Data Service) writes: "Maybe
> we need to find a way OCLC can get recognition for having provided this service
> in the beginning and committing to its ongoing support. Supporting
> 'persistence' is not something you can back away from. I know they are a
> non-profit cooperative so perhaps the membership need to be lobbied to support
> allocating some funding for better support. ... OCLC are to be commended for
> developing and supporting this service for so long so that we could generate
> purls for persistent identification without them being reliant on the
> persistence of our own organisations. This is their strength and hopefully OCLC
> will consider either handing over the domain purl.org for the resolver service
> to be maintained by an organisation for whom it is core business or decide it
> is part of their core business."
>
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