[SEEK-Taxon] some notes on digital object identifiers

[Shawn Bowers]

DOIs were looked at in another project I was involved in.  As you say
below, you need a service for resolving DOI references.  DOIs are simply a
means of redirection, you assign a DOI and a handle server maps the DOI to
the associated item.  The handle server must be registered, and the main
service forwards requests to your handle server, so that your server can
resolve the DOIs. For example, the ACM digital library uses DOIs for all
of there pubs. If you type one of their DOIs into your browser, the DOI
server forwards the request to the ACM handle server, which then maps the
DOI to the associated webpage.

As I recall, there was some expense in registering a handle server (a few
thousand dollars?)  -- it was a while ago and for our purposes DOIs were 
a bit overkill. 


Shawn


On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 thau at learningsite.com wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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