Tag: url

PURLs

PURLs are only as good as the maintenance work that has gone into updating the underlying URLs when they inevitably change. And in the lucky cases where the underlying URL haven’t changed, all the work that has gone into managing the infrastructure behind that URL namespace in order for that URL to stay the same. how many of the PURLs still work? This is complex enough for an actual research project and not just a quick blog. Over in the notebook I started by sampling all the target URLs (N=405637 n=662). In the process I noticed that it was oversampling some domains quite a bit like my.yoolib.net. So I tried again, but instead of sampling all the URLs I sampled the PURL namespaces (N=21894, n=644) and picked a random URL from each PURL namespace. This seemed to work better but still seemed to oversample, with hostnames list http://www.olemiss.edu showing up quite a bit. It looks like they might create a new PURL namespace for every finding aid they put up.

Of course, testing whether a URL still works is surprisingly tricky business: the response could be 200 OK but say Not Found, or it could be a totally different page (content drift)

Good urls matter

~10 years ago, jon udell was one of my favorite thinkers about the web. after a long hiatus, he is coming back to form, here on why good urls matter.

In a 1997 keynote talk Andrew Schulman put up a slide that contained just a URL: UPS Tracking “Think about what this means. Every UPS package has its own home page on the web!” Also, potentially, every bank transaction, every calendar appointment, every book (or paragraph within every book), every song (or passage or track within every song), every appliance (or component within every appliance). If we needed to, we could create URLs for grains of sand, each as compact and easy to exchange as Andrew Schulman’s Fedex URL. The supply of web names is inexhaustible, and the universe of their meaning is unbounded.

The geoURI scheme

The ‘geo’ Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme is another step into that direction and aims to facilitate, support and standardize part of the interaction with geospatial services and applications. Accessing information about or trigger further services based on a particular place on earth shouldn’t be any harder than writing an email by clicking on a ‘mailto:’ link.