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