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Low-tech solution for dereferenceable identifiers #118

Open mih opened 6 months ago

mih commented 6 months ago

Related to #117

It would be great, if initiatives/organisations/group could provide "endpoints" for dereferencable identifiers.

Use case: A collaborative research effort spanning multiple institutions. People in the collaboration need to be identifiable. ORCID and others like it solve this problem, but not everyone has/wants such an identifier. An identifier is also not easily attached to an institution, because people move.

It would be great to have a simple solution to recommend for trivially managing such a namespace. Something like: create a ns directory on your homepage and put a file into it, named after each identifier in the namespace. The content of the file may even provide some information about the identified entity in some format (but this is not needed, especially for people this would be complicated without managing consent too). The file's main purpose is that of a low-tech placeholder in a namespace (which is easily verified with HTTP (404 if unclaimed).

mih commented 6 months ago

For datalad, we could support (by convention) a dataset-specific namespace at https://datalad.org/ns//....

This would not provide dereferencable identifiers per se (just a unique IRI namespace). However, eventually requests could be served based on information in the dataset registry...