What is the sustainable URI of a taxon?

[frmichel]

Dear all,

I would like to link a taxonomic Linked Data dataset I'm working on with EoL traitbank. Although the JSON-LD produced today by the EoL API is not valid (see issues #139 and #140), I assume it's gonna be fixed eventually. And at that time, we will be able to exploit our dataset links with EoL.

But a question comes up then: what is the sustainable URI for a taxon?
If I add double-quotes to the @id value (one of the issues mentioned in #139), I get this:

  "item": {
    "@id": "328542",
    "@type": "dwc:Taxon",
    "scientificName": "Monodon monoceros Linnaeus, 1758",
    "dwc:taxonRank": "species",
    ...

Here, the @id value is a relative URI that, according to the specification, should be resolved against either the @base value (but there is no such "@base" annotation in the context) or against the document URL, http://eol.org/api/traits/328542 in my example. Hence, currently the taxon URI is the same as the URL: "http://eol.org/api/traits/328542".

This does not sound like a sustainable URI. Issue #139 suggests URIs like http://eol.org/pages/328542. This is an option: indeed, content negotiation could be used to link either to the HTML page at this URL or to the JSON-LD representation. The only problem I see is that the "pages" term makes think of HTML pages, whereas we want to name a taxon, whatever its representation. So another option is to use more generic URIs like http://eol.org/taxon/328542, that in turn could lead either to http://eol.org/pages/328542 or http://eol.org/api/traits/328542.

Is this something that you guys have an answer for today?
Note that it would be great to agree upon that even though this is not technically in place yet, since it would allow people (like me) to develop datasets with EoL URIs that are the good one in the first place.

I thank you in advance for your help with this matter.

Regards,
Franck.