Jakob Voss wrote:
Call me pedantic but if you do not have an identifier than there is no
hope to identity the publication by means of metadata. You only
*describe* it with metadata and use additional heuristics (mostly search
engines) to hopefully identify the publication based on the description.
But the entire OpenURL infrastructure DOES this, and does it without
using search engines. It's a real world use case that has a solution in
production! So, yeah, I call you pedantic for wanting to pretend the use
case and the real world solution doesn't exist. :)
You can call it "description" rather than "identification" if you like,
that is a question of terminology. But it's description that is meant to
uniquely identify a particular publication, and that a whole bunch of
software in use every day succesfully uses to identify a particular
publication.
It IS a hacky and error-prone solution, to be sure. But it's the best
solution we've got, because it's simply a fact that we have many
publications we want to identify that lack standard identifiers.
If a twitter annotation setup wants to be able to identify publications
that don't have standard identifiers, then you don't want to ignore this
use case and how actually in production software currently deals with
it. You can perhaps find a better way to deal with it -- I'm certainly
not arguing for OpenURL as the be all end all, I rather hate OpenURL
actually. But dismissing it as "impossible" is indeed pedantic, since
it's being done!
Jonathan
