Persistent Identifiers for Subsets of Data

Datasets can be extremely large. Examples include meteorological records spanning decades and covering large geographical areas, @@@ non-meteo examples@@@. Such datasets are very rarely processed en masse, rather, an application will typically require a specific subset of the dataset, such as the temperature records for a particular location for the previous 24 hours, @@@other subset examples@@@.

These subsets are typically accessed through an API that may accept HTTP GET requests and so the query can be encoded directly in the URL thus:

http://example.com/api/?sql= Blah blah - CGI-encoded SQL query