[SEEK-Taxon] some notes on digital object identifiers

[Kennedy, Jessie]

Hi Dave

Remember I mentioned somebody using DOIs in taxonomy while in Lisbon - well
it was George Garrity, Michigan - it was for prokaryotes - which might be
different in terms of nomenclatural/concept taxonomy - but anyway - here's a
link to the white paper he presented at the meeting I was at:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~jag/wdmbio/garrity.htm

you could maybe follow up to see if anything's happenned.

Jessie

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thau at learningsite.com [mailto:thau at learningsite.com]
> Sent: 17 November 2003 18:13
> To: seek-taxon at ecoinformatics.org
> Subject: [SEEK-Taxon] some notes on digital object identifiers
> 
> 
> 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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