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At the time of the meeting Marty had not been able to confirm whether the new PURLZ service is still actively under development. Since the meeting an email from ____ Thom Hickey Nov. 3 indicates it has been, but primarily as a re-implementation of the features of the original PURL service without new extensions.: "The PURLz project is very active. We are currently in the midst of getting the new code running here so we can migrate purl.org to it. Developments beyond the current PURL functionality are on hold until we get past that hurdle."
It's not clear whether we could have access to the source code. If contact can be made and looks promising, Simeon and Brian will look at the structure of the new implementation and assess whether it makes sense for Brian to do a local test implementation.
Another thread of discussion has surfaced since the meeting in the form of an email from Eric Neumann posted May 30th to the public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org list following a presentation by Eric Miller to a SemTech 2008 session, including:
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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 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. |
We also briefly discussed Pete Hoyt's local PURL implementation for use in assigning an actionable URL in the 856 field when cataloging records; it was not designed to scale so should not be considered a candidate for this project.
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