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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^{Image Removed} or http://ebi.ac.uk/^{Image Removed} . Some of you know this has been a long (and difficult) discussion, and we still have no clear proposal of how to do this. And here is where we have lost momentum-- no clear path forward that most of us would be happy with...

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.