FAIRsharing record for: FAIR Signposting

This FAIRsharing record describes: FAIR Signposting is an intentionally simple, standards-based, RESTful "follow your nose" approach to help software agents navigate among the various resources that make up a research artifact on the web. FAIR Signposting does so by revealing the topology of the research artifact by means of unambiguously typed links that interconnect its various constituent web resources. The typed links reveal what the persistent identifier of a research artifact is, what the type of artifact it is, where its landing page is, where its content resources are and of which kind they are, where metadata that describes the artifact in which format can be found, what the persistent identifier of its authors is, which license applies to it. The approach is not descriptive (i.e. not metadata driven) but navigational (i.e. URI/link driven), allowing a software agent to find a pathway from one resource that is part of a research artifact to another, in order to accomplish a task at hand. The link types that are used are IANA-registered. The links can be conveyed using a Link Set, HTTP Link headers, or HTML links.