Generating and Maintaining Vocabulary IRIs

In order to support xAPI IRI stability and curation, ADL will initially support requests for creating new persistent IRIs. If ADL were no longer operational or if governance of the xAPI changed to another organization, the w3id.org IRIs can be easily udpated via GitHub by anyone in the xAPI community or transitioned to any newly appointed governing organization. The following high-level process outlines the steps involved for minting a new IRI.

1. Verify that an existing vocabulary term IRI does not already exist by searching the xAPI community resources such as the Registry, http://registry.experienceapi.com and the xAPI Vocabulary Publishing Server (under development), http://xapi.vocab.pub.
2. Create each vocabulary dataset IRI and vocabulary term IRIs using the Recommended IRI Design Practices provided in the previous section of this document.
3. Generate and publish the vocabulary as HTML/RDFa and JSON-LD using the recommended classes and properties defined in this specification. A basic example of this is provided in Appendix A. For more specific guidelines on generating and publishing the RDF, read Publishing Vocabulary Datasets as HTML/RDFa and xAPI Vocabulary Primer.
4. Use a dedicated service for creating and maintaining new IRIs. Use a service that supports IRI resolution (redirects) such as https://w3id.org. Both http://purl.org and http://registry.experienceapi.com provide simple browser-based interfaces for generating IRIs. However, currently purl.org is temporarily not allowing new IRIs as it is transitioned to a new organization for governance. Currently, only the w3.org service offers a way to resolve the IRIs. This is expected to change and options will improve as this specification has been more widely adopted and implemented. For the technically savvy, the preferred way to use the https://w3id.org/xapi IRI pattern and following the aforementioned IRI design practices:
   1. ADL has forked the https://github.com/perma-id/w3id.org source code repository from GitHub.
   2. Re-direct entries for each vocabulary dataset are already in place. Contact ADL about publishing the HTML/RDFa vocabulary on the ADL server or you can host it on your own.
   3. If you host it on your own server, we will need to add new rules for your target server.
   4. The w3id.org administrators will review the pull request and merge it. Once the pull request is merged, the changes go live immediately.
   5. Once the vocabulary IRIs have been published, announce and submit each new vocabulary dataset IRI to the xAPI Vocabulary Publishing Server (http://xapi.vocab.pub) or each vocabulary term IRI to the Registry (e.g., currently the xAPI/TinCan Registry, https://registry.experienceapi.com).