URIs for AIM25 access metadata

We've been giving some thought to a suitable URI scheme to adopt for this project which could mesh with the requirements of the current AIM25 metadata requirements.

The current AIM25 system contains four types of access records: personal names (Person), corporate names (Organisation), subject (Subject) and geographic names (Place). To allow semantic linkages to be formed, we shall need a coherent set of URIs that can handle all of these.

For Subjects, one option may be the UKAT thesaurus which is available as SKOS RDF. Each concept here has already been assigned a URI: for instance, for 'Poetry' this is http://www.ukat.org.uk/thesaurus/concept/525. Note that UKAT is no longer being edited, however, and so may become out-of-date in the future.

For place names, there are several gazeteers available: the Archives Hub recommends the Getty Thesaurus (http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/index.html),
but there is not yet a set of URIs authorised by the Getty (although they are working on this).

The LOCAH (Linked Open Copac Archives Hub - http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/) projectproduced a set of guidelines for URIs which look very useful. For each of these categories they would take this form:-


Personal and corporate name names

LOCAH recommends the following format for personal names:-

{root}/id/person/{rules}/{person-name}

so, once we have decided on a suitable root - let's say for the moment http://data.aim25.ac.uk/, for Burns | John | 1774-1868 | surgeon, we'd have

http://data.aim25.ac.uk/id/person/ncarules/burnsjohn1774-1868surgeon.

Similarly for corporate names, we'd have:-

http://data.aim25.ac.uk/concept/organisation/nra/stthomasshospitallondon

For geographic names, we'd have:-

http://data.aim25.ac.uk/id/place/ncarules/grimsbylincolnshireta2709

and finally for subjects:-

http://data.aim25.ac.uk/id/concept/aim25subjects/medicalsciences


These seem to be viable options, although a final decision has yet to be reached.