PURL2

OCLC has been running the PURL service with only minor outages since 1995.  PURLs (Persistent Uniform Resource Locators) provide a level of indirection allowing the separation of the name of a Web resource from the location of it.  We have made the source code available so that others can run PURL systems, and several organizations do so.

OCLC has contracted with Zepheira to reimplement the PURL code which has become a bit out of date over the years.  The new code will be in written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license.  We expect it to be embeddable, opening up many new uses.  We frequently run into situations where an easy way to manage HTTP redirects within an application would be useful, so I imagine others do to.

Eric Miller is the president of Zepheira.  Eric used to work in the Office of Research here at OCLC before taking a job at MIT for the W3C.  All three organizations are excited about the possibilities of the new software and we just issued a joint press release about it.

Our schedule is to have the reimplementation completed this fall.

--Th