...
- It can be hard for servers to detect a terminal '?' as different from the absence of a query string. It is in fact impossible in Tomcat, and requires rewrite rules in Apache.
- unlike '...??' (legal URL), '...?' is not a "legal" URL, so software libraries don't pass it through
- Although '?' is intuitive and language-agnostic, it can also be puzzling to some people.
- The metadata to be returned was only vaguely defined (mostly by example).
- The metadata syntax (ANVL) was non-standard and largely defined by example.
Requirements and Desiderata
Karen/Bertrand
- At minimum, ?info must resolve to a human readable landing page, and should provide a gateway to machine-readable metadata
- It is strongly recommended that meta tags with [something like] DC are implemented (I’m suggesting this since they are simple html, and all orgs should be able to do something with those)
- Secondary to this, organizations are encouraged to use whatever data format[s] is appropriate in their context as the machine-readable data version of ?info, but encourage that organizations:
- utilize an established metadata standard (like DC) where possible
- utilize an established serialization for their metadata such as XML, JSON, or an RDF serialization such as JSON-LD or Turtle.
- express the document type via the “Content-Type:” HTTP header.
- utilize either content negotiation or queries in the form “&format=[json|xml]” property to deal with alternative formats.
Karen: I added c) as a suggestion. I don’t know if you want to indicate a preferred serialization/standard beyond this, or specify minimal metadata fields (the who, what, etc.), or keep it very loose. We could then provide examples that lay out different flavors that are acceptable – I would be willing to contribute an example.
John
- Some continuity with past
- human-readable metadata returned
- machine-readable metadata returned
- including persistence statements
- who/what/when/where paradigm (ERC)
- THUMP-like request protocol -- ?info(X,Y) vs ?info&arg1=X&arg2=Y
- Never RDF
- unfortunately, JSON-LD is RDF; see tweet https://twitter.com/justin_littman/status/1206944465027584001
- however, widely used schema.org borrows elements names from JSON-LD and uses them in meta tags, which aren't at risk of RDF complexity
Proposed solution discussions, in reverse chronological order
...