Issue/Form of URIs

What should the host name(s), paths, .types look like?

For a proposal under development see URI Format Considerations. It lays out the solution space in more detail than this page.

Idspace in host name vs. idspace in path

TBD: Analyze this issue in detail. The question is whether we write http://sharedname.org/ncbi_gene/12345 vs. http://ncbi_gene.sharedname.org/12345 , or, if idspace designators are numeric, http://sharedname.org/12/12345 vs. http://12.sharedname.org/12345 .

May 2009 proposal

Alanr: The following proposal is no longer current. It predates conversations regarding new purl effort - new proposal forthcoming.

Designed with a mind to

Use current PURL partial redirections (hence things more likely to be varied are at end of path)
Keep option of using purl.oclc.org as one of our redirection servers (hence top level domain "n", which is also reserved there)

Databank metadata: http://sharename.org/n/<databank>, e.g. http://sharename.org/n/uniprot

About record: http://sharename.org/n/<databank>/<id>, e.g. http://sharename.org/n/uniprot/Q9ULZ0

Specific encoding: http://sharename.org/n/<databank>/<encoding>/<id>, e.g.

Version named by provider at accession level: Use provider's identifer for the version.

Version named by provider "build": Use provider's build identifer in path immediately before ID. There is an about record for such versions.

Other archived version: Use date in path immediately before ID - YYYY[-MM][-DD] with assumption that imprecision implies that we don't know when in the interval the version was. There is no about record for such versions. Information about them is in the metadata for the generic "about".

note: an earlier version of this page mistakenly noted a problem with colon in identifiers. In fact this is only problematic if a) Such identifiers are used for predicates, and b) there is a digit immediately after the colon. In such cases one can't serialize a statement using a such-named predicate in RDF/XML