Identifiers

Following on from my previous post about prism:doi I didn’t mention, or reference, the ongoing ISO work on DOI, Indeed I hadn’t realized that the DOI site now has a status update on the ISO work:

_“The DOI® System is currently being standardised through ISO. It is expected that the process will be finalised during 2008. In December 2007 the Working Group for this project approved a final draft as a Committee Draft (standard for voting) which is now being processed by ISO. Copies of the Committee Draft (SC9N475) and an accompanying explanatory document detailing issues dealt with during the standards process (SC9N474) are provided here for information.

BISG and BIC have published a discussion paper called “The identification of digital book content” - https://web.archive.org/web/20090920075334/http://www.bisg.org/docs/DigitalIdentifiers_07Jan08.pdf. The paper discusses ISBN, ISTC and DOI amongst other things and makes a series of recommendations which basically say to consider applying DOI, ISBN and ISTC to digital book content. The paper highlights in a positive way that DOI and ISBN are different but can work together (the idea of the “actionable ISBN” and aiding discovery of content). However, it doesn’t go into much depth on any of the issues or really explain how all these identifiers would work together and the critical role that metadata plays.

Dan Cohen at Zotero reports (Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces) on a very interesting tie up that will allow researchers using Zotero to deposit content in the Internet Archive and have OCR done on scanned material for free under a two year Mellon grant. Each piece of content will be given a “permanent URI that includes a time and date stamp in addition to the URL” ( would Handle or DOI add value here?) and be part of Zotero Commons (things can also be kept private within a group).

Another DCMI invitation. And a list. Lovely.

See this message (copied below) from Douglas Campbell, National Library of New Zealand, to the dc-general mailing list.

(Continues)

I’ve just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at Crossref- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?

The InChI (International Chemical Identifier from IUPAC) has been blogged earlier here. RSC have especially taken this on board in their Project Prospect and now routinely syndicate InChI identifiers in their RSS feeds as blogged here.

As reported variously last month (see here for one such review) IUPAC have now released a new (1.02beta) version of their software which allows hashed versions (fixed length 25-character) of the InChI, so-called InChIKey’s, to be generated which are much more search engine friendly. Compare a regular InChI identifier:

Oh dear. Yesterday’s post “Using ISO URNs” was way off the mark. I don’t know. I thought that walk after lunch had cleared my mind. But apparently not. I guess I was fixing on eyeballing the result in RDF/N3 rather than the logic to arrive at that result.

(Continues.)

(Update - 2007.10.02: Just realized that there were some serious flaws in the post below regarding publication and form of namespace URIs which I’ve now addressed in a subsequent post here.)

By way of experimenting with a use case for ISO URNs, below is a listing of the document metadata for an arbitrary PDF. (You can judge for yourselves whether the metadata disclosed here is sufficient to describe the document.) Here, the metadata is taken from the information dictionary and from the document metadata stream (XMP packet).

The metadata is expressed in RDF/N3. That may not be a surprise for the XMP packet which is serialized in RDF/XML, as it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to render it as RDF/N3 with properties taken from schema whose namespaces are identified by URI. What may be more unusual is to see the document information dictionary metadata (the “normal” metadata in a PDF) rendered as RDF/N3 since the information dictionary is not nodelled on RDF, not expressed in XML, and not namespaced. Here, in addition to the trusty HTTP URI scheme, I’ve made use of two particular URI schemes: “iso:” URN namespaces, and “data:” URIs.

(Continues.)

ISO has registered with the IANA a URN namespace identifier (“iso:”) for ISO persistent resources. From the Internet-Draft:

“This URN NID is intended for use for the identification of persistent resources published by the ISO standards body (including documents, document metadata, extracted resources such as standard schemata and standard value sets, and other resources).”

The toplevel grammar rules (ABNF) give some indication of scope:

NSS     = std-nss

std-nss = “std:” docidentifier *supplement *docelement [addition]

Well, it all went very quiet for a while but glad to see that the URI Template Internet-Draft has just been republished:

_“A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts

directories.

Title : URI Template

Author(s) : J. Gregorio, et al.

Filename : draft-gregorio-uritemplate-01.txt

Pages : 9

Date : 2007-7-23

URI Templates are strings that can be transformed into URIs after

embedded variables are substituted. This document defines the

syntax and processing of URI Templates.