Content negotiation for Handles

[Julian Gautier]

Hi everyone,

The article "A Data Citation Roadmap for Scholarly Data Repositories"(https://doi.org/10.1101/097196) recommends that:

"Data repositories and identifier service providers such as identifiers.org or DataCite in addition may implement content negotiation for the persistent identifier expressed as HTTP URI, returning machine readable metadata in various formats.

Content negotiation is for example supported by identifiers.org and DataCite and can return metadata in XML, RDF, Bibtex and other metadata formats."

This is number 10 of  the roadmap's 11 recommendations, which have influenced some of the Dataverse software's development.

The GitHub issue at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/3699 was opened to discuss and track any work done for this recommendation. We found that DOIs (from DataCite and the California Digital Repository) already do this. But Handles do not. I'm not sure how Handles work compared to DOIs or what the Dataverse community can do, if anything, so that content negotiation is implemented for the Handles registered by Dataverse repositories. So I wrote that I'd ask in several other channels like this Google Group.

Who controls Handle URIs? Is it technically possible or does it makes sense to implement content negotiation for them?

Thanks for any advice!

Julian

Julian Gautier

Product Research Specialist, IQSS