New in the Helmholtz Cloud: PIDA – Persistent Identifiers for Semantic Artifacts

Meet PIDA (Persistent Identifiers for Semantic Artifacts), a new addition to the Helmholtz Cloud, operated by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Ever followed a link in a paper only to find it no longer works? For the vocabularies and ontologies that describe research data, broken links are more than an annoyance: they break the connections between datasets. Designed specifically for semantic artifacts, PIDA offers redirection with persistent URLS (PURLs) to mitigate this problem when setting up a vocabulary, ontology or knowledge graph. It works like a forwarding address: you move house, but your mail still arrives.

Additionally, its content negotiation allows a single identifier to resolve to different representations of a resource, such as a human-readable HTML page or machine-readable RDF. PIDA also keeps an eye on your links by checking them regularly and lets you know if one breaks, before your users notice. The service, including support from the PIDA team in setting up redirects, is free of charge for academic users, and HMC commits to operating it for at least ten years.

PIDA complements other HMC services already available in the Helmholtz Cloud. In fact, the Helmholtz Knowledge Graph already uses PIDA PURLs to assign globally unique persistent identifiers to harvested metadata records and semantic entities within the graph.

Make your links last: discover PIDA in the Helmholtz Cloud, go to the service and request PURLs.