<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>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-06-03T13:36:28.887Z
2017-06-03T13:36:28.887Z
Matt Bashton
<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>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-06-01T02:50:44.643Z
Do you have examples of specific URLs that have stopped working? Some projects try very hard to provide permalinks.
Kusalananda
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-06-01T06:47:08.867Z
Genome releases are versioned, so the URL may move but the data is still there.
Devon Ryan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-06-01T07:19:11.103Z
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
llrs
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-06-01T09:45:21.567Z
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).
Konrad Rudolph
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-06-01T12:15:04.023Z
The question should be flavoured with some examples, but it rises a very good point.
Kamil S Jaron
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-06-01T19:59:18.987Z
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.
Manuel
<data-download>
Stable download URLs
# 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.  

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## 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>


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