[Esip-preserve] DataCite to require "landing pages"

[Greg Janée]

On Feb 29, 2012, at 2:34 PM, Mark A. Parsons wrote:
> Landing pages should ultimately be both human and machine readable.

I've always thought this would be the best of both worlds, as both  
humans and programmatic clients can then get representations of  
resources that they can do something with.  But we seem to be hampered  
by the lack of an agreed-upon technical approach.  Is this something  
that ESIP might like to look at?  Two approaches that have been  
suggested:

1. Content negotiation.  Clients use HTTP's Accept header mechanism to  
request a specific representation of a resource: RDF, OAI-ORE, etc.   
DataCite has put together an alpha version of this concept at http://data.datacite.org/ 
.  I don't think there are (yet) any guidelines as to what resource  
types return what information in what ways.

2. Identifier "inflections".  This is an idea proposed by John Kunze  
at CDL.  A client can request a specific representation by adding a  
syntactic cue to the identifier.  For example, it's already part of  
the ARK specification that appending a question mark (?) to an  
identifier returns metadata; perhaps appending a slash (/) requests a  
"landing page" or other human-oriented experience as opposed the  
resource directly.

-Greg