URN NBN Resolver Demonstration

Web sites:

• http://www.persistent-identifier.de/
• http://nbn-resolving.de/ResolverDemo-eng.php

Demonstrated by Maurice Vanderfeesten.

Actually his very cool Prezi presentation will be more cogent than my notes: URN NBN Resolver Presentation. [EDIT: Moreover, he included his own notes in his discussion of the identifier workshop session.]

A few notes to supplement this:

• The system uses URNs based on National Library Numbers (URN-NBN) as their persistent identifiers.
  
• So it's a well-established bibliographic identification scheme, which can certainly be expanded to the research repository world. (The German National Library already covers research data.)
  
• The pilot got coded start of 2009.
  
• They are using John Kunze's Name-To-Thing resolver as their HTTP URI infrastructure for making their URNs resolvable.
  
• Tim Berners-Lee might be surprised to see his Linked Data advocacy brought up in this presentation in the context of URNs. But as long as things can also be expressed as HTTP URIs, it does not matter.
  

  The blood on the blade of the W3C TAG URN finding is still fresh, I know.

  
  
• Lots of EU countries are queuing up to use this as persistent identifier infrastructure.
  
• The Firefox plugin works on resolving these URNs with predictable smoothness. :-)
  
• They are working through what their granularity of referents will be, and what the long term sustainability expectations are for their components (the persistence guarantees, in the terms of the PILIN project)
  
• They would like to update RFC 2141 on URNs, and already have in place RFC 3188 on NBNs.
  
• They now need to convince the community of the urgency and benefits of persistent identifiers and of this particular approach, and to get community buy-in.