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<P><FONT SIZE=2>And following on re: DOIs, BHL has become a member of CrossRef and starting in February will begin assigning DOIs first to our monographs & then on to journal content. There is an annual fee for membership and then a fee for every DOI assigned. BHL is absorbing these costs for community benefit.<BR>
<BR>
Chris<BR>
<BR>
-----Original Message-----<BR>
From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org on behalf of Roderic Page<BR>
Sent: Wed 1/5/2011 2:17 AM<BR>
To: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org<BR>
Cc: Paul Murray; Chris Freeland<BR>
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] GUIDs for publications (usages and names)<BR>
<BR>
Few quick comments on this thread.<BR>
<BR>
DOIs<BR>
----<BR>
<BR>
CrossRef provides an OpenURL resolver for discovering whether a DOI <BR>
exists for a publication. This is how publishers find DOIs for <BR>
references cited in manuscripts, and several bibliographic tools use <BR>
it to populate their databases (e.g., Zotero, Mendeley). I provide a <BR>
wrapper to this resolver at <A HREF="http://bioguid.info/openurl">http://bioguid.info/openurl</A>.<BR>
<BR>
The number of taxonomic works with DOIs is growing, and may be rather <BR>
larger than most people realise, especially as publishers such as <BR>
Wiley's digitise archives of society journals, and as JSTOR increases <BR>
its content. Add yes, CSIRO uses DOIs.<BR>
<BR>
The "brief citations" Tony mentions, which are widely used by <BR>
nomenclators, do pose problems for services such as CrossRef. I <BR>
discuss one approach to solving this in my paper "bioGUID: resolving, <BR>
discovering, and minting identifiers for biodiversity informatics" (<A HREF="http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-10-S14-S5">http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-10-S14-S5</A><BR>
), where I describe a service that takes a page within a reference <BR>
and tries to locate the DOI for the enclosing paper. I'm using this <BR>
service at the moment to find papers in the recently released Plant <BR>
List.<BR>
<BR>
OCLC<BR>
----<BR>
<BR>
Paul mentions <A HREF="http://www.worldcat.org">http://www.worldcat.org</A>, which is a great resource, <BR>
albeit riddled with duplicates (although the library world has its own <BR>
notion of what counts as a duplicate). BHL content is now appearing in <BR>
OCLC.<BR>
<BR>
CiteBank<BR>
--------<BR>
<BR>
As Steve points out, we're going to need a large community effort to <BR>
assemble a bibliography of all taxonomic work. Without wishing to side <BR>
track this thread, I think this is a task best undertaken with a much <BR>
larger community than we traditionally think of. The bibliographic <BR>
site Mendeley or something similar, such as Zotero, seem better bets <BR>
than doing this ourselves.<BR>
<BR>
Linked Data<BR>
-----------<BR>
<BR>
Without wishing to get too bogged down in a discussion of linked data, <BR>
perhaps a few points are worth noting.<BR>
<BR>
1. Although DOIs currently don't play nice with linked data (unless <BR>
wrapped in a service such as <A HREF="http://bioguid">http://bioguid</A>), according to Geoff <BR>
Bilder, CrossRef has plans to add content negotiation and RDF to <A HREF="http://dx.doi.org">http://dx.doi.org</A><BR>
, and is close to flicking the switch to make this happen.<BR>
<BR>
2. The bulk of linked data resources for biology are not provided by <BR>
the primary data sources (e.g., GenBank or PubMed) but by third party <BR>
wrappers around those services. These services have made choices about <BR>
URIs, vocabularies that might not hold if and when the primary data <BR>
providers, such as NCBI, start serving RDF. In my experience these <BR>
third party services may also omit things that we may think of as <BR>
vital, for example <A HREF="http://bio2rdf.org">http://bio2rdf.org</A> doesn't include specimen or <BR>
locality information for GenBank sequences.<BR>
<BR>
3. For many resources we either have no linked data URIs or too many. <BR>
This either leads to somebody having to mint URIs, typically for <BR>
something that isn't their own data (e.g., I provide HTTP URIs for <BR>
ISSNs), or having to accommodate multiple URIs, which makes specifying <BR>
relationships between objects rather tricky (one database may describe <BR>
a citation link between two documents using PubMed identifiers, while <BR>
another describes the same link using DOIs).<BR>
<BR>
My point is that linked data isn't a panacea, in some respects it just <BR>
makes the mess we're in easier to see. The hope of the linked data <BR>
community is that eventually it will all come together. For an <BR>
alternative take on this I recommend Stefano Mazzocchi's essay "On <BR>
Data Reconciliation Strategies and Their Impact on the Web of Data" <A HREF="http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/304/">http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/304/</A><BR>
<BR>
Regards<BR>
<BR>
Rod<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
---------------------------------------------------------<BR>
Roderic Page<BR>
Professor of Taxonomy<BR>
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine<BR>
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences<BR>
Graham Kerr Building<BR>
University of Glasgow<BR>
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK<BR>
<BR>
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk<BR>
Tel: +44 141 330 4778<BR>
Fax: +44 141 330 2792<BR>
AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com<BR>
Facebook: <A HREF="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192">http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192</A><BR>
Twitter: <A HREF="http://twitter.com/rdmpage">http://twitter.com/rdmpage</A><BR>
Blog: <A HREF="http://iphylo.blogspot.com">http://iphylo.blogspot.com</A><BR>
Home page: <A HREF="http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html">http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html</A><BR>
<BR>
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