active purls

Stu Weibel’s post on ‘List Making Meets Redirection’ prompted me to comment on some of the Active PURL work (PURLs with associated services) we at Zepheira has been developing. Example ‘Active PURLs’ might be notification to publishers of problems with target URLs (basically a link-checker for PURLs), notification to readers of updates to target PURLs (a “what’s new” feed for PURLs), etc. More specifically the architecture allows for an open marketplace to grow around such associations with PURLs (or PURL patterns) and services.

While I only touched briefly on this work in my comment, David Wood has expanded on this in his blog and given additional context on the potential business applicability of this approach.

Perhaps the most interesting use of Active PURLs to enterprises might be the ability to provide standardized RDF metadata about SOA Web Services as well as relational databases. UDDI is so broken, we might as well fix it with existing SemWeb standards. That is not a new idea, but the application of Active PURLs to the problem is.

Applying the lessons and standards of the web back inside the enterprise makes sense for managing evolution, supporting collaboration and more effectively delivering products and services. More and more businesses are starting to realize the true benefit of being *in* the Web, not just on it.