Inflection change proposal

Problem: existing ARK inflections ? and ?? have not been adopted widely, for reasons that include

• 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.

Proposed solution discussions, in reverse chronological order

2019.11.04 a different proposal for the new ?info inflection

Proposed: for any ARK X, X?info should lead to an HTML-formatted "landing" document (page) with metadata embedded as JSON-LD. The metadata, in human- and machine-readable form, includes

1. The ARK X
2. Descriptive metadata:
   1. who
   2. what
   3. when
   4. where
   5. how (metatype, similar to resourcetype)
   6. domain-specific elements (eg, publications vs physical samples vs vocabulary terms)
3. PIDs to first-level variants (versions, formats, change history) and components of X, if any
4. PID to the first (immediate) logical ancestor of X
   1. eg, if X is a PDF variant of a document object, this points to the logical object ARK listing X along with its sibling HTML and MSWord forms
5. PID to the last (root) logical ancestor of X
   1. eg, if X is a section of a chapter of a book, this points to the book logical object
6. Change history, if any
7. Licensing and accessibility information
8. How to cite, including "cite-as" header
9. Persistence statement

A great example to follow would be the A data citation roadmap for scholarly data repositories.

2019.09.16 proposal for a new, explicit word-based inflection: ?info

• ?info requests metadata
• ?info required, but spec continues to reserve '?' and '??' as optional synonyms 
• ?info requests anvl/erc, but the spec permits (as always) alternate formats
  • continues to use THUMP conventions with parenthesized args
  • ?info equivalent to ?info()

This is a small adjustment to the spec that doesn't quite specify how to request alternate formats, but cracks open the door to work that we can complete, not in the spec, but in the AITO context. An example of that might be the THUMP request:
                  ?info()as(application/json)

2019.08.05 more discussion of collapsing existing ? and ?? into just ??

2019.07.15 Proposed: suppress '?' inflection (let it be optional), leaving just the '??' inflection

• as before, '??' requests kernel elements plus any persistence statement
• '??' easier to implement than '?' (the latter being impossible to detect in Tomcat)
• '?' may be supported by older implementations (briefer record)
•    ... or should '?' be made identical to '??'  ?