Persistent identifiers in Naples

[Norman Gray]

Alberto and all, hello.

Is there a plan for Data C&P in Naples?  I think the time might be ripe to make lots of progress this spring.

My most immediate interest is to push ahead with the project implied by <http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/ivoa/long-term-uris.html>.  That's concerned with 'long-term' names, and I come to it via the semantic web, and vocabulary URI-names, but it's essentially the same problem as devising URIs for referring to data.

That's formatted as an IVOA Note, but I think there's a couple of directions this could go in:

  * Putting this on a standards track, to turn into a Recommendation for naming what we might call 'document URIs' [1]

  * Be absorbed into a more general Recommendation concerning data URIs in astronomy (if the resolution of this issue implies a resolution to the 'document URIs' issue)

  * Perhaps there's no need for any recommendations at all, if there's some obvious consensus (using EZID, DataCite, ...) that everyone starts using.

Each of these would seem to be consistent with Alberto's notes at the end of <http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/InterOpDec2010DCP/AstronomyIdentifiers.pdf>

What would be reasonable goals for Naples?  It would be premature to produce a document, because there are many interested parties who'd have to have a say. On the other hand, the IVOA probably knows most of the interested parties, many of whom might be wanting someone to take a lead.  It might not take much to get this snowball rolling; which is good, as long as we set it rolling in a useful direction.

Best wishes,

Norman


[1] What I've referred to as 'document URIs', above, are URIs for those things, such as the FITS standard or the IVOA-Thesaurus concept of 'Planet', which are produced deliberately and in some sense 'by hand', as opposed to being algorithmically generated for data items.


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk