On Aug 22, 2007, at 9:57 AM, Eric Jain wrote:
Note: While most publishers seem to have adopted the DOI system, I
don't see many people using it (e.g. in queries) on our site. But
if someone who works for a publisher is lurking, they might have
better usage stats!
I'm don't want to come across as rude, but I do get the impression
that it might help the discussion if people stepped out of their
little worlds for a second.
I just don't understand the relevance the current usage stats of DOIs
in UniProt queries should have for how and in which ways they may be
used in the Semantic Web in 3 years from now.
[...] The problem is that even if you want to version your data and
allow retrieval of obsolete data, the infrastructure for this isn't
trivial. For example, we've invested some effort to support this
for some of our data [e.g. try http://beta.uniprot.org/uniprot/
P05067?version=42], but that's just part of our data, and we don't
support all formats, either.
The best solution to disappearing data I can see is that you have
some Google-scale, Internet Archive-like projects that go and
collect all data.
That's a lot of hand-waving there, and quite frankly I'd be depressed
if that were all to hope for. However, the good news is that there is
an increasing number of digital archive projects whose goal is long-
term preservation of data to prevent it from disappearing. These
archives will all need to use opaque identifiers to track
relationships, provenance, versions, and other metadata.
-hilmar
--
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: Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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