Answers.Body: <p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_uniform_resource_locator" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Persistent uniform resource locator or PURL</a> is one such solution, these are designed to be a bit more robust than permalinks in so much as they are supposed to survive the change of domain name.  The bio ontology community already use them <a href="http://purl.bioontology.org/docs/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://purl.bioontology.org/docs/index.html</a> </p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2017-06-03T13:36:28.887Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2017-06-03T13:36:28.887Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Matt Bashton
Body: <p>One big problem that I'm regularly facing is that URLs for downloading Bioinformatics data (e.g., RefSeq releases or NCBI genome releases) disappear.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have any good solution for this?</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2017-06-01T02:50:44.643Z
Comments.Text: Do you have examples of specific URLs that have stopped working? Some projects try very hard to provide permalinks.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Kusalananda
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2017-06-01T06:47:08.867Z
Comments.Text: Genome releases are versioned, so the URL may move but the data is still there.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Devon Ryan
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2017-06-01T07:19:11.103Z
Comments.Text: Could you specify which platform or which kind of data you are looking for a stable URL? Many sites provide a ftp server for big downloads
Comments.UserDisplayName: llrs
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2017-06-01T09:45:21.567Z
Comments.Text: I think this is a good question, maybe with minor modifications: URIs for big databases rarely disappear but stable identifiers aren’t always obviously marked (e.g. Ensembl defaults to “current” release rather than a stable URI).
Comments.UserDisplayName: Konrad Rudolph
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2017-06-01T12:15:04.023Z
Comments.Text: The question should be flavoured with some examples, but it rises a very good point.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Kamil S Jaron
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2017-06-01T19:59:18.987Z
Comments.Text: I was referring to NCBI stuff, e.g., dbSNP where the latest release for GRCh37 has disappeared and has to be interpolated from an UCSC table.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Manuel
Tags: <data-download>
Title: Stable download URLs
ThreadText: # Stable download URLs
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2017-05-31)
  
  One big problem that I'm regularly facing is that URLs for downloading Bioinformatics data (e.g., RefSeq releases or NCBI genome releases) disappear.
  
  Does anyone have any good solution for this?
  
  **Tags:** data-download
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: Do you have examples of specific URLs that have stopped working? Some projects try very hard to provide permalinks.  
  > **username_2**: Genome releases are versioned, so the URL may move but the data is still there.  
  > **username_3**: Could you specify which platform or which kind of data you are looking for a stable URL? Many sites provide a ftp server for big downloads  
  > **username_4**: I think this is a good question, maybe with minor modifications: URIs for big databases rarely disappear but stable identifiers aren’t always obviously marked (e.g. Ensembl defaults to “current” release rather than a stable URI).  
  > **username_5**: The question should be flavoured with some examples, but it rises a very good point.  
  > **username_0**: I was referring to NCBI stuff, e.g., dbSNP where the latest release for GRCh37 has disappeared and has to be interpolated from an UCSC table.  
  
  ---
  
  ## 1 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_6 on 2017-06-03. Score: 4
  
  The [Persistent uniform resource locator or PURL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_uniform_resource_locator) is one such solution, these are designed to be a bit more robust than permalinks in so much as they are supposed to survive the change of domain name. The bio ontology community already use them <http://purl.bioontology.org/docs/index.html>
  
  
  ---
  
  