CrossTech: The Response Page

(Update - 2010.02.10: I just saw that I posted here on this same topic over a year ago. Oh well, I guess this is a perennial.)

I am opening a new entry to pick up one point that John Erickson made in his last comment to the previous entry:

"I am suggesting that one "baby step" might be to introduce (e.g.) RDFa coding standards for embedding the doi:D syntax."

Yea!

It might be worth consulting the latest CrossRef "DOI Name Information and Guidelines" (PDF) to see what that has to say about this. Section 6.3 - The response page has these two specific requirements for publishers:

When metadata and DOIs are deposited with CrossRef, the publisher must have active response pages in place so that they can resolve incoming links.
A minimal response page must contain a full bibliographic citation displayed to the user. A response page without bibliographic information should never be presented to a user.

What is truly shocking about these requirements is that this are purely user focussed. There is no mention whatsoever of machines. One might have thought that with the Linked Data gospel in full swing there would at least be a nod to machine-readable metadata. But there's none. I'm not saying that there should be any requirement, or even any recommendation. But a mention might have been useful to chivvy us all along.

I agree with John that publishers could be encouraged (or even just reminded) that machine-readable metadata could be made available through various mechanisms: HTML META tags (such as we currently provide at Nature - and as blogged here earlier), COinS objects, RDF/XML comments, or best of all RDFa markup as John mentions.

The Web is getting semantic. It's about time that CrossRef members joined the wave. And would be helpful if CrossRef were there to help us with some new guidelines too!

Comments

Tony,I am chief editor for IJDC, for which we don't yet issue DOIs. We know this is a BAD THING, but there are problems with very low budget journals getting changes to happen; I hope it will get fixed real soon now. The journal is currently based on OJS. I wondered whether a page such as http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/130 fits the definition of a response page?

Clearly we are a mile away from offering metadata in RDF yet!

Posted by: Chris Rusbridge | February 10, 2010 12:51 PM

Hi Chris:

Are you kidding me?! That looks like an excellent response page. It has well structured HTML META tags (and especially making use of DC qualifiers) as well as RDF via the RSS 1.0 feed. I converted that RDF/XML into RDF/N3 for legibility - see below.

Job well done. Of course, a DOI might make a better global identifier than "130". Just saying. And RDFa would also be a nice addition. But this is really excellent work.

Would that more publishers could offer this kind of machine-readable metadata in their response pages.

Cheers,

Tony

1. HTML META Tags:

2. RDF/N3 (Via RSS 1.0 Feed):

@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix prism: <http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/1.2/basic/> .
@prefix rss: <http://purl.org/rss/1.0/> .

<http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc> a rss:channel;
prism:copyright "

Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by ...";
prism:issn "1746-8256";
prism:publicationName "International Journal of Digital Curation";
dc:language "en-US";
dc:publisher "University of Bath";
rss:description "The International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC) is published ... ";
rss:items [
a rdf:Seq;
...
rdf:_2 ;
...
];
rss:link "http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc";
rss:title "International Journal of Digital Curation" .

<http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/130> a rss:item;
prism:publicationDate "2009-12-07";
prism:volume "4";
dc:creator "David Giaretta",
"Sergio Albani";
dc:date "2009-12-07";
rss:description "ESA-ESRIN, the European Space Agency Centre for Earth Observation (EO), is ...";
rss:link "http://ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/130";
rss:title "Long-term Preservation of Earth Observation Data and Knowledge in ESA through CASPAR" .

Posted by: Tony Hammond | February 11, 2010 5:05 AM

By default, I agree with @Tony...

This is an opportunity to illustrate HOW a DOI might be used to conveniently bind different representations together. In this case we have at least:

* text/html
* text/pdf
* rdf/n3
* rdf/xml

Each of these has a given URI, which can be persisted (aggregated) in the DOI record. In the content-negotiation savvy world that we have been discussing here and in my blog, an agent could ask the DOI's HTTP proxy for the content-type it needed and get a URI to one of the above artifacts in the 303 response.

One last word (not DOI related!): In addition to affixing the document metadata to the splash page via META tags as you've done, it could also be "bound" to this URI by embedding RDFa. Why is this important? Doing this turns that PAGE into a data source in the "Web of Data" --- really , it's that simple.

Posted by: John S. Erickson, Ph.D. | February 11, 2010 7:29 AM

The Response Page

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