Some features that have the “gnis:feature_id:” tag will lead to pages that don’t exist. For example, East Bethel Cemetery has the gnis:feature_id: tag that leads to a 404 on the USGS website.
Should I delete this tag as it leads to a broken link? Should it be kept?
You should keep the gnis:feature_id tag. The feature ID remains valid, even though the main viewer no longer shows them.
More discussion about the archived classes:
Here’s East Bethel Cemetery in GNIS-LD, one of the official distributions of GNIS.
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The archived GNIS records are not deleted. They still exist, they’re just not being actively maintained and they’re not published in the current data set. But they can come back.
A while ago I had a detailed discussion with GNIS staff about whether a particular feature was a Well (archived) or a Spring (current). I even made a trip to survey the site and report on my findings since I happened to be near the area.
In this case, although there was some evidence of human effort to collect water at the site, there was not enough evidence to establish that the feature was a Spring. But if there had been, the record would have been moved from the archived data set to the current data set. And it would have kept its original Feature ID in the process.
Also, if you’d rather not write SPARQL queries, I made a form that makes searching for features in GNIS-LD easier: GNIS-LD Query
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