Register FINOS as persistent identifier namespace on the Web

[noelmcloughlin]

Please consider registering FINOS as a persistent identifier namespace on the Web.

Web applications dealing with Linked Data often need URLs that are very stable. Registering FINOS as a persistent identifier namespace allows member projects to leverage the service. For example, FINOS projects publish their vocabulary at: https://w3id.org /finos/, and potentially in machine readable format in future.

Persistent identifiers namespaces examples:

https://w3id.org/finos => https://www.finos.org
https://w3id.org/finos/legend => https://github.io/finos/legend # vocabulary, machine generated (CI)
https://w3id.org/finos/glossary/XYZ/ => https://github.io/finos/glossary/XYZ # vocabulary, machine generated (CI)

The use cases and business value derives from W3C Semantic web initiatives, making FINOS data more accessible on the Semantic Web. W3ID.org is run by W3C Persistent Identifiers Committee and scales well.

It could be persistent identifier namespace for vocabulary developed by Open RegTech, etc, etc

Procedure: Raise PR at https://github.com/perma-id/w3id.org#readme

[mindthegab]

Thanks @noelmcloughlin - @jgavronsky can you chime in here?

[maoo]

Checking this issue again (sorry for the terrible delay); last week we consolidated our project metadata into https://github.com/finos/finos-landscape/blob/master/landscape.yml

It could be interesting to build a fairly simple script that:

• is triggered on every change to landscape.yml
• parses landscape.yml and generate an .htaccess file, which is then pushed into w3id

This should cover the project URLs; re. data glossaries, I like the idea, but I don't know where it could be applied; maybe FDC3 Standard schemas? We're working now on auto generating them, though I wonder if the FDC3 team would see value in it, cc @robmoffat .

Last question is, what do we want to do with these URLs? Where do we want to use them and how? Is it worth changing URLs across the board, or we just keep them there for when it's going to be needed? As @noelmcloughlin stated in the issue description, this makes a lot of sense when dealing with Linked Data, which is what we don't host yet.

[eddie-knight]

Curious to see this issue is still open. I'm curious —if we want to push this — are we able to articulate the persona we are serving with this solution, and what problem it would solve for them?

[noelmcloughlin]

Chris Mungall reached out to FINOS last year to offer a talk, might be worth connecting and getting some ideas on best practices for your published glossaries and schemas. Publishing domain glossaries may have value, because ultimately you would want your definitions to be authoritative and sufficiently trusted to be used by external parties - a research scientist writing a paper on financial regulation may prefer linking to definitions backed by permanent identifier service rather than static URL which may disappear 2 days after her paper is published ;-)

And third parties may use frameworks which support 'same_as', 'close_match', 'broad_match', and they may select a finos W3ID as supports one of those definitions for applications which are dealing with some financial market concepts like this example. Originally my idea was to register the finos namespace just in case you find some use cases in future. The ticket could be closed if no use cases exists today.