In 2014, the ISA Programme supported an informal Task Force working towards a common policy for the management of persistent, HTTP-based URIs by EU institutions. This policy includes a common governance and management of URIs, common design rules for persistent URI sets and a Persistent URI Service running under the data.europa.eu sub-domain.
HTTP URIs are gaining ground in the domain of information exchange between EU institutions. However, EU institutions, as well as other users, will only rely on and use URIs minted by other institutions if there is a reliable persistent URI policy to support them with satisfactory service level guarantees, including long-term persistence, resolvability, response times, and information quality.
In 2014, the ISA Programme supported an informal Task Force working on a common policy for the management of persistent, HTTP-based URIs of EU institutions. A Persistent URI Service on the data.europa.eu sub-domain is responsible for the registration and management of persistent URI namespaces and the forwarding of HTTP requests (URI redirection) towards a local register. A local register is a trusted authentic source of resources under the control of an appointed EU institution. The Persistent URI Service manages requests for new namespaces, redirection rules and monitors web traffic.
What is a Persistent URI?
A URI is a compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource. A URI can be classified as a locator, a name, or both. Using persistent, well-formed URIs can help Member States overcome conflicts of semantic interoperability, enabling them to provide cross-border public services and supporting the Single Market.
The Persistent URI Service
The Persistent URI Service has two categories of stakeholders:
- Users: staff members of the EU Institutions, who play the role of namespace owners when they want to register a namespace; and
- PURI administrators: members of the PURI Service team, either part of the Technical Team, the PURI Steering Committee (which oversees the activities of the Service and makes high-level decisions) and the PURI Committee (which handles regular requests).
A Task Force composed of experts from various institutions of the EU has defined and implemented the PURI Service, which provides services such as:
- Registering a URI namespace: a user (staff member of an EUI) requests the registration of a namespace, while the request is processed by the URI Committee in collaboration with the Steering Committee if the request is exceptional in some way);
- Configuring redirection rules: the URI Technical Team is responsible to configure the redirection rules;
- Responding to HTTP requests: the PURI Service applies redirection rules to respond to incoming HTTP requests;
- Monitoring HTTP requests and responses: this is done by the Technical Team and it allows the analysis of URI persistence, as well as identifying collections with slower response times or broken URIs.
The service is already operational, and specific tools are used for the implementation and operation of the PURI Service. These tools will be improved gradually to support the service to grow as demand picks up, and handle an increasing number of local registry requests, redirection rules, and the monitoring of high-intensity traffic. Currently, the PURI Service provides persistent URIs for several pilot projects: (1) ESCO, (2) ELI, and (3) DOI. The experience gathered during the implementation of the pilots has contributed to the development and the evolution of the PURI Service towards a fully operational service for the EU public administrations.
Further Information
To find out more about the Persistent URI Service, you can access:
- The article and related case study on Persistent URIs;
- This presentation and report on Persistent URIs;
- The homepage of ISA² Action on 'Promoting semantic interoperability amongst the European Union Member States (SEMIC)'; and
- The SEMIC community page.