Dear Chris,
Damn, I was hoping nobody would ask about specifics as that would expose the fact that I've not thought much (any) of this through.
My instinct is that for those bits that will interact with existing publishers (e.g., will be cited in lists of references in papers), then DOIs are the logical choice. Hence, article and monograph-level would get DOIs. This would satisfy the desire to make taxonomic literature as visible to readers. It would also not require CrossRef to change any metadata that they serve.
For within-monograph (e.g., pages), then I guess the issue boils down to (a) cost, and (b) what metadata would be served? Here, I'd be happy with Handles (there's nothing stopping us having Handles for the articles and monographs as well as DOIs).
So, we could have
Article: DOI:xxxxxx HDL:yyyyyyyy
Monograph: DOI:xxxxxxx HDL:yyyyyyyyy p. 1 HDL:yyyyyyyy.1 p. 2 HDL:yyyyyyyy.2 . . p. n HDL:yyyyyyyy.n
In some ways it would be ideal to have a single GUID, but if DOIs are too costly then I still think we need DOIs for integration. I also wonder whether we need DOIs for page elements. When are they going to be used? I suspect, only in the context of (a) old literature being marked up, or new online taxonomic publications (say if BMC published a journal). In both cases, the underlying XML could be structured in such a way to recognise Handles.
Hope this makes sense. My instinct is that authors of a paper in Science, say, just want to cite a monograph or article, but somebody doing a taxonomic revision may want a much finder degree of citation, and in an ideal world they would be doing this electronically online.
Regards
Rod
On 20 Mar 2007, at 17:37, Chris Freeland wrote:
Rod,
Fascinating stuff, as always. DOIs have come up time and again in discussing the Biodiversity Heritage Library and I wondered if you had any thoughts about DOIs for historic literature. You were fairly adamant at the EoL meeting in Woods Hole in February that DOIs were critical for BHL, which we can all agree, but the unresolved question is at what level(s) we need DOIs. For serials it makes sense to assign at the article level, but what about as detailed as page-level DOI or as broad as title-level DOI? What then of monographs - would you want a DOI at the page for protologue linking? Looking forward to your thoughts,
Chris
Chris Freeland Application Development Manager Missouri Botanical Garden (314) 577-9548
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Roderic Page Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 9:15 AM To: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org; tdwg-guid@lists.tdwg.org Cc: Simon Rycroft; Vince Smith; David Remsen; Donat Agosti; William Piel Subject: [tdwg-guid] BioGUID
Dear All,
I've put together a web site called http://bioguid.info which, rather grandly, is an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by providing resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications,
taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens.
These URIs (or "GUIDs") can be resolved by a web browser to display HTML, but under the hood are resolved to RDF (which you can see by viewing the source of the web page you get for a URI).
The web interface is really window dressing, I just wanted a way to display RDF that wouldn't frighten people (me included). For some URIs all I do is grab XML and reformat it (e.g., DOIs). For GenBank records,
all manner of agony is involved in trying to extract specimen and publication links.
A good place to get a sense of what bioguid.info is about is to start with this Pubmed record: http://bioguid.info/pmid:17079492
From this, you can get a list of sequences. If you click on one of those, you'll see a link to a specimen, which you can then look at (you'll need Firefox 1.5, Camino, Webkkit, or a browser with a SVG plugin for the full effect).
What I'm hoping to do is start doing things like taking a TreeBASE record, getting the linked sequences, running these through bioguid.info to extract georeferenced specimen links, so with minimal effort we get a map (and eventually a Google Earth tree a la Bill Piel).
The glue to make this happen comprises HTTP URIs that are dereferenceable to RDF. This is my mantra for the day.
Regards
Rod
Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
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------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com