Manage PURLs | Permanent Identifiers for Semantic Artifacts

# Before requesting a PURL

It is easy to request or update a PURL in PIDA and we offer several possibilities to do so. However, before requesting a new PURL in the PIDA system, please check the PIDA repository (opens new window) for already-existing PURLs. We also advise checking popular terminology services such as NCBO Bioportals (opens new window) or ontology lookup service (OLS) (opens new window) for namespace abbreviations that are currently in use. Choosing a unique abbreviation for your identifier and ontology reduces overlap and ambiguity between semantic artifacts.

# Manage PURLs

Ready to go? Then choose one of the following three options to obtain your PIDA PURL:

Submit an issue to our repository
Fork the repository & push your .htaccess file
Send us an email Please be advised that of these methods include a review by the PIDA staff, i.e. there is a human in the loop! We are motivated and will try to resolve tickets and requests swiftly, but we cannot guarantee that your PURL will be available immediately. Please keep that in mind when requesting your PIDA PURL.

# Submit an issue

Possibility 1: open an issue Request a new PURL by creating an issue in our issue board. Use our prepared PURL submission form (opens new window) to ensure that you supply all required information. Should there be additional information required, please add this to the issue thread. We will evaluate the input and issue the namespace as soon as we have all the required information.

# Fork the repository and push your `.htaccess` file

Possibility 2: fork and push You can fork the repository, create your own .htaccess file and push the changes to the main repository through a pull request. For this follow these steps:

Fork (opens new window) the PIDA repository (opens new window).
Prepare your .htaccess (opens new window) file. When creating the .htaccess the following information is mandatory to be provided through the header of the .htaccess file:

# Contact person name: registrar name
# Contact person email: registrars email address
# Artifact: abbreviation of artifact 1, abbreviation of artifact 2, abbreviation of artifact n
# Artifact Name: full name of artifact 1, full name of artifact 2, full name of artifact n

Add or update your redirection rules and commit (opens new window) your changes.
Submit a pull request (opens new window) for your changes. Upon submission of the pull request, we will review your changes and integrate them into the PIDA system.

Please help us to issue PIDA PURLs effectively by following GitHub's good practices:

test your links and .htaccess syntax locally.
squash (opens new window) multiple commits into one commit before a pull request. This helps to ensure a cleaner merge history.
provide descriptive commit details (e.g. resource name, what changes made, etc.).

# Send us an email

Possibility 3: email to user support: The above seems daunting? Instructions are unclear or seem ambiuous? No problem! Contact us via email describe your case as well as you can, and we will support you in getting your PIDA PURL.

# Testing content negotiation

Here some further tips on testing the PIDA content negotiation: Content negotiation can be tested using the curl command-line utility to specify a particular representation of a resource to the same URI. For example:

To request the HTML document describing the scientific events ontology (opens new window):

curl -L -H "Accept: text/html" https://purls.helmholtz-metadaten.de/seo

To request the RDF file of the ontology, the following command could be used

curl -L -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml"  https://purls.helmholtz-metadaten.de/seo

You will get results that look like:

HTTP/ 1.1 303 See Other
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:18:54 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu)
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: \*
Location: https://saidfathalla.github.io/.../index.html
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1