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ASN Resolution Service Overview

The ASN uses an entity-relationship model with two entities - Standard Document and Statement. These entities are each assigned an inherently globally unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). ASN URI's are free to share (in fact, we encourage it!) and can be embedded in your site's HTML markup using the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) specification. ASN URI's are "resolved" over the web via the ASN Resolution Service. The most basic resolution is the HTML view that you see when you visit any ASN URI in your web browser but the real interoperable magic happens when you request a RDF serialization for a particular ASN URI.

How to Resolve an ASN URI

Suppose you wanted to share information regarding a particular competency from British Columbia - Sequence objects, images, and events, and recognize the positive and negative aspects of continuities and changes in the past and present. Well, the ASN provides a URI that uniquely identifies and represents that statement e.g. http://asn.desire2learn.com/resources/S2725466. Notice the "ID" portion of this ASN URI starts with the letter "S" - S2725466, that is because it is an ASN Statement. All ASN Statement URI's can be distinguished by the "S" at the beginning of the identifier and similarly, all ASN Standard Documents can be distinguished by the "D" at the beginning of the identifier e.g. http://asn.desire2learn.com/resources/D2725130.

For any Standard Document or Statement you can:

Request HTML
By simply viewing the ASN URI in a web browser or by specifying 1) no HTTP Accept header or 2) submitting a HTTP Accept header of text/html.

Examples:

http://asn.desire2learn.com/resources/S2725466
http://asn.desire2learn.com/resources/D2725130

Viewing the HTML page is OK for humans but not suitable for machines or interoperability. So, the ASN URI can also be resolved in a variety of machine readable formats. That way, if you find an ASN URI in-the-wild, you can unambiguously identify which Statement or Standard Document is being used.

Request RDF via a file extension
You may request RDF by appending a file extension to the URI:

Current cache configurations are impacting the Request RDF via HTTP Accept header as described below. We apologize for any inconvenience as we work to re-enable requsting RDF via Accept header.

Request RDF via HTTP Accept header
You may request RDF using a HTTP Accept header (supplied quality 'q' factors will be respected):

Hacking ASN URI's
Based on the entity, you may add special file modifiers (or hack) our URI's as follows:

Statement resources can be expanded to include the descriptions of the resources that constitute the full taxon path of the requested resource (stem-to-leaf).

Standard Document resources can be expanded to include descriptions of all of the Statement resources that constitute the full contents of the requested resource. You may also request the manifest file.

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