w3id.org

Appearance

What is w3id.org? ​

w3id.org is a permanent URL redirection service for the Web. It is operated by the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group.

The service does one thing. You claim a path under https://w3id.org/, and you say where requests for that path should be sent. When somebody resolves your identifier, w3id.org answers with an HTTP redirect to the location you nominated.

GET https://w3id.org/my-project/vocab
                │
                ▼
      w3id.org  ──►  302 Found
                     Location: https://my-project.example.org/2026/vocab

Think of it as a switchboard. It connects a request for information to wherever that information currently lives, and it can be reconfigured when the information moves. The identifier that people wrote into their data, their code, and their published papers never has to change.

Why it exists ​

Applications that deal with Linked Data need URLs that are extremely stable. A vocabulary term, an ontology IRI, or a JSON-LD context URL gets embedded in documents and datasets that outlive the web server that first published them. Universities reorganise. Companies get acquired. Projects get funded for three years and then stop.

An identifier under w3id.org survives all of that, because the identifier is decoupled from the hosting. See Purpose for more.

How a change gets made ​

Everything the service does is defined by files in a public Git repository at github.com/perma-id/w3id.org. Each identifier is a directory under ids/ containing an .htaccess file with Apache rewrite rules.

To add or change an identifier, you open a pull request against that repository. A maintainer reviews it and merges it, and the change is deployed to the service. See Creating an identifier.

Who runs it ​

A consortium of organisations has pledged responsibility for keeping the service running:

They handle all administrative tasks associated with operating the service. The social contract between them gives each organisation full access to everything needed to run the site, so that several of them could fail, lose interest, or become unreachable for long periods without affecting the service.

Joining the consortium ​

Introduce yourself on the mailing list first (see below) and say what your organisation would bring. Then open an issue on the issue tracker titled Seeking to join the W3ID Consortium with your details.

Community ​

Discussion happens on the public-perma-id@w3.org mailing list. That is the right place to raise questions about the service, propose policy changes, or discuss a use case that the scope does not obviously cover.

Disclaimer ​

The letters "w3" in the domain name stand for "World Wide Web". Other than hosting the community group, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is not involved in the support or management of this service in any way. An identifier under w3id.org carries no endorsement from the W3C, and is not a W3C standard, recommendation, or publication.