[SEEK-Taxon] some notes on digital object identifiers

[Beach, James H]

SEEK--Taxon Members:

Here are some *strategic* thoughts on the choice of taxon name and
concept identifiers for consideration. (I am not actually advocating for
DOIs, but asking questions here about how we evaluate them as a
strategic option.)


I think we do want to consider and deliberate on the issue of DOIs very
carefully.  There are some immediate constraints like the economic model
the DOI foundation uses to sell DOIs and their fees.  I think the
strategic value of the identifier for SEEK and for ECOINFORMATICS.ORG
and for NSF.GOV and for the research community needs to be carefully
considered in the evaluation of an ID architecture.  Tactical
implementation problems can be made to go away through clever design and
negotiation with third parties--if the strategic value is great enough
to justify any particular approach.

The white paper that Jessie provides a URL for below is a thought piece
that fairly points out the advantage of using DOIs for names and
concepts because of their value as links into other active, related
communities, especially scientific publishers that use them.  Although
none of them are to my knowledge using DOIs yet at the level of
scientific names in their publications, the use of them for finer and
finer levels of DO resolution is a long-term trend and the likely future
direction of the technology - at least for publishers who are relatively
rich compared to us and relatively longer-lived. It makes economic sense
for them to use them for cross-referencing, it brings more eyes to their
scientific content.

The white paper points out several advantages in this context that would
not be present in the foreseeable future with GRID resource IDs.  

So say, one of our *strategic* objectives for SEEK was to have a
cross-sector demonstration of linking and navigation between the
published scientific literature (mostly copyrighted and owned by the
publishers) and the taxon name and concept services in SEEK.  Which
identifiers would you choose for that?

Say you wanted to get BioOne or Allen Press which handle most of the
worlds taxonomic literature involved with us perhaps on the advisory
board or in some consultative collaboration--which kind of identifier
would we have in common with them?

In the early days of the Species Analyst, I promoted Z39.50 to Dave
Vieglais for his consideration because it had a development community of
300+ souls and dozens of commercial library system vendors which could
be counted on to move the standard forward with all of their funding and
resource base.  Using Z would also have made us very popular with the
library integration crowd who would like to integrate other academic
holdings besides serials and books into their campus collections
management systems.   But the story changed when HTTP and XML came on
strong and DIGiR provided a more open accessible approach for more
developers in more of the mainstream.  But no library will ever speak
DIGiR, we gave up that possibility, integration between research
publication databases and research collections will happen but at
another level, not with Z.

But, here I think SEEK has another strategy-level consideration.  Do we
choose technologies (in this case identifiers) to make SEEK as
internally homogeneous as possible as a deliberate strategic choice to
increase our development efficiency and software supportability?  

Or do we look for technologies that would potentially (if the
implementation and economic issues can be cleared) make SEEK more
relevant and integrative with other segments of the research community,
in this case research publishers-both for profit and not-for-profit
(like all the society based publishers), but also potentially with
places like NLM, libraries, OCLC, Zoo Record, ITIS, etc.

Who's worrying about the strategic aspects of these technology choices
besides me?


--------------------------------
James H. Beach
Biodiversity Research Center
University of Kansas
1345 Jayhawk Boulevard
Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
Tel: 785 864-4645, Fax: 785 864-5335
Televideocon: (H.323): 129.237.201.102



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kennedy, Jessie [mailto:J.Kennedy at napier.ac.uk] 
> Sent: 18 November, 2003 10:21 AM
> To: 'thau at learningsite.com'; seek-taxon at ecoinformatics.org
> Subject: RE: [SEEK-Taxon] some notes on digital object identifiers
> 
> 
> 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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> > http://www.ecoinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/seek-taxon
> > 
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