Tag: Signposting

BioHackEU23 report: Enabling FAIR Digital Objects with RO-Crate, Signposting and Bioschemas BioHackrXiv preprint from ELIXIR BioHackathon 2023
Locating provenance for a RESTful web service
This blog post shows how RESTful web services can provide, and link to, provenance data for their exposed resources by using the PROV-AQ mechanism of HTTP Link headers. This is demonstrated by showing how to update a hello world REST service implemented with Java and JAX-RS 2.0 to provide these links.

The PROV-AQ HTTP mechanism is easiest explained by an example:
```
GET http://example.com/resource.html HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/html

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-type: text/html
Link: <http://example.com/resource-provenance>; 
         rel="http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#has_provenance"; 
         anchor="http://example.com/resource"

<html>
  
</html>
```
This request for http://example.com/resource.html returns some HTML, but also provides a Link: header that says that the provenance is located at http://example.com/resource-provenance.