[SEEK-Taxon] some notes on digital object identifiers

[thau@learningsite.com]

Hello everyone,

I've spent a little time looking into the role Digital Object Identifiers
(www.doi.org) might play in SEEK specifically, and taxon concept
registries in general.  Has anyone else looked at this stuff, or taken
interest in it?

DOI is a system for identifying, registering and sharing intellectual
property.  Many scientific journals are now giving their articles DOI
numbers and registering them with the DOI system.  In the simplest form,
the DOI number basically maps onto a URL.  The owner of the DOI number can
change the URL that the number maps to.  So, anyone referencing the number
using standard DOI resolution techniques will get sent to the correct URL.
That's the simplest incarnation of DOI.  You can also attach lots of
metadata to the number and search on the metadata.  The DOI doesn't have
to map to a URL, it can map to lots of different services too.

DOI is mainly targeted at publishers who use it to provide better access
to their content.  To get your DOIs, you have to make a deal with a
registering agent, kind of like with IP addresses.  Alternatively you can
become a registering agent yourself, in which case you have to make a deal
with doi.org (officially, the International DOI Foundation (IDF)).  

Different registering agents allow for different metadata.  To get the
most out of using DOI for taxonomic information, someone would have to set
up what they call an application, which is an XML schema for the metadata
you want to attach to DOIs and potentially a set of services to query the
metadata.  

I think it's a pretty interesting type of registry.  If publishers of
species descriptions tagged the species names with DOIs, we'd have a
pretty good way of specifying which taxonomic concept someone meant when
they used a name, and a good way to link directly to the species
description.  Right now, publishers aren't doing this, but if there was a
project which supported DOIs, they might.

In terms of SEEK, it wouldn't be tough to include a way to include a spot
for storing a DOI (or any other registry identifier) in our information
about taxonomic concepts.  They just look like this: 10.1000/1234

All DOIs start with 10. something.  The something is a prefix assigned by
an registering agent. For example Nature has prefix: 1038. Following the
prefix, the publisher can use more or less any set of characters to
represent whatever piece of intellectual property they want to represent.  
An example article in Nature has doi:10.1038/35057062.  To get to the
article you can do this: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/35057062

Has anyone else looked at DOIs?

Dave