I'm very pleased to report that NetKernel has been chosen as the platform for the next generation purl.org service.

Even if you've not heard of PURL you've certainly used it. It is an extremely important part of the web infrastructure, providing permanent URLs for some of the web's most important resources. Everything from government tax systems, digital libraries, web service schema definitions, to semantic taxonomies and ontologies use PURL to provide consistent permanent URL locations for web resources. These PURLs are guaranteed to live for as long as the resource - irrespective of where or how the resource is physically hosted or located. This provides solid dependable stability for Web systems that must be guaranteed to work for years and years and years.

The PURL service is used by institutions, government and commercial users alike. The first PURL service has been running like clockwork for over 12 years and was developed using first generation web infrastructure software based on a fork of apache 1.0 and scripted in perl.

With demand growing and new applications envisaged, a major investment to update PURL onto modern web infrastructure was decided. I'm really thrilled and proud to say that NetKernel has been chosen as this new infrastructure platform.

To find out more there is a joint press release with Zepheira who are contracted to deliver the new system for OCLC.