I think this is an excellent reference to work from, when dealing
with the issue of URIs in RDF generation & processing.
As I have always seen it (this is admittedly a the view of an RDF
naif), DOIs and LSIDs both seek to fulfill the role one would expect
to be played by URIs in the STM literature and biomedical object
domains, respectively.
For those who had the chance to read the paper, I would specifically
point to the discussion of the CrossRef & OpenURL projects. Both
relate to how you resolve a DOI tied to very practical Use Cases.
One is very much focussed on the commercial issue of dis-ambiguating
which journals a given library system has a subscription to. The
goal for this (OpenURL - http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/
sfx_openurl.htm) was to create an infrastructure for publishers (and
aggregators) to resolve this issue in a way that is transparent for
the user as they click on a link to an article (HTML or PDF). The
SFX system many may be familiar with seeing in the search engines
hosted by their library systems.
CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/) is more designed to address the
core issue on the article of how you both maintain stable pointers to
inherently unstable online resources, and also providing a URI-like
generic resource pointer which can be resolved to the actual resource
the moment a reader clicks on the reference in a bibliography.
CrossRef is much more focussed on dealing with the many different
scenarios related to the latter task and coming up with a way that -
again - from the user's point transparently gets them to the correct
resource. CrossRef the organization seems to pitch themselves as the
service designed to de-reference DOIs - which obviously makes the
work they've done very relevant to this conversation.
Clearly, both of these issues are ones the folks from BMC & PLoS can
give us some very practical insight into.
The one major project related to the topic in the article that the
author seemed to neglect is the Internet Archive (http://
archive.org). This is a long standing project (in Internet time,
anyway - going back to 1996). They trawl the entire public net and
backup it up as often as possible. They have massive, robotics-based
tape drive systems working round the clock. The original archive
took almost a year to crawl the entire "public" net (it still takes
about 2 months to cover everything, though there is a lot of effort
they've put into to categorizing the rate at which contents changes -
with content having a more rapid turnover getting more frequent
observation). After the end of the 1996 presidential campaign -
within weeks, the only source for historians to analyze use of the
web in the election was the Internet Archive. This has continued to
be the case for many research projects focussed on the use or and
evolution of web content. The IA has set up to donate periodic dumps
to the Library of Congress. They're technology has greatly improved
over the years (they now have PetaByte storage racks and much a much
more mature software layer). Though IA doesn't solve the issue of
the "hidden"/dynamic web all that much better than the other search
engines (which is the space in which most if not all scientific
literature lives), they clearly provide a great utility to difficult
to manage mess the HTML web often devolves into. IA is also
intimately involved in the discussions in the library science
community on this issue of digital reference resolution and
archiving, as well as the critical issue of FIXING IP law - very much
aligned with the efforts of the Creative Commons. Some CC folks are
also directly involved with IA. IA has set up a specific group to
help researchers make better use of IA content (http://
www.archive.org/web/researcher/researcher.php).
Cheers,
Bill
On Jun 18, 2006, at 12:52 PM, John Madden wrote:
Alan et al,
Wow, great topic. I'll need to get my thoughts together on this.
Meanwhile, operationally what a uri "means" is clearly related to
the question of its (non)persistence. I recently found a wonderful
historical review of this topic from the point of view of a library
scientist. The group might enjoy it:
http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v97n04/2005-42.pdf
John
On Jun 18, 2006, at 1234, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
[It was on this list: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-
semweb-lifesci/2006Jun/0149]
-Alan'
On Jun 18, 2006, at 12:20 PM, John Madden wrote:
I can't locate the beginning of this thread. Did the discussion
start on another list?
Thanks.
John
On Jun 17, 2006, at 1708, Eric Neumann wrote:
This is a very useful and important discussion thread, and I
would like to see others on the list to contribute their
thoughts/concerns as well.
May I ask all the contributors to include HTML links to any
acronyms they reference (e.g., NAPTR)? This will make it easier
for the rest of us to catch up quickly, and to eventually
collect the approaches out there into a comprehensive list of
viable implementations.
thanks,
Eric
--- Sean Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> MW>
> MW> I believe this SRV-redirection behaviour is part
> of the LSID spec, and
> MW> we use it for all of the BioMOBY LSIDs...
> MW>
>
> It also uses NAPTR's as described in IETF RFC's
> 3401->3405 to traverse the
> URN namespace, allowing the dereferencing process to
> bridge the gap that
> separates authority name strings from service
> locations. From what I
> recall, the URN specs specifically do not permit
> names and locations to be
> confounded.
>
> Kindest regards, Sean
>
> --
> Sean Martin
> IBM Corp.
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on
> 06/16/2006 12:59:12 PM:
>
> >
> > On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 10:41 -0400, Alan Ruttenberg
> wrote:
> >
> > > something, but as far as I can see, the only
> authority related to
> > > namespaces in URLs is the DNS, and while there
> is the SRV field which
> > > might be used to direct someone to information
> about the namespace, I
> > > don't know whether anyone does.
> >
> >
> > I believe this SRV-redirection behaviour is part
> of the LSID spec, and
> > we use it for all of the BioMOBY LSIDs...
> >
> > M
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > --
> > Mark Wilkinson
> > Asst. Professor, Dept. of Medical Genetics
> > University of British Columbia
> > PI in Bioinformatics, iCAPTURE Centre
> > St. Paul's Hospital, Rm. 166, 1081 Burrard St.
> > Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6
> > tel: 604 682 2344 x62129
> > fax: 604 806 9274
> >
> > "For most of this century we have viewed
> communications as a conduit,
> > a pipe between physical locations on the
> planet.
> > What's happened now is that the conduit has become
> so big and
> interesting
> > that communication has become more than a
> conduit,
> > it has become a destination in its own
> right..."
> >
> > Paul Saffo - Director, Institute
> for the Future
> >
> >
>
Eric Neumann, PhD
co-chair, W3C Healthcare and Life Sciences,
and Senior Director Product Strategy
Teranode Corporation
83 South King Street, Suite 800
Seattle, WA 98104
+1 (781)856-9132
www.teranode.com
Bill Bug
Senior Analyst/Ontological Engineer
Laboratory for Bioimaging & Anatomical Informatics
www.neuroterrain.org
Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy
Drexel University College of Medicine
2900 Queen Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19129
215 991 8430 (ph)
610 457 0443 (mobile)
215 843 9367 (fax)
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