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Since I’ve already blogged about this a number of times before here, I thought I ought to include a link to a fuller writeup in this month’s D-Lib Magazine of our nature.com OpenSearch service which serves as a case study in OpenSearch and SRU integration: doi:10.1045/july2010-hammond

(Click image for full size graphic.) I thought I could take this opportunity to demonstrate one evolution path from traditional record-based search to a more contemporary triple-based search. The aim is to show that these two modes of search do not have to be alternative approaches but can co-exist within a single workflow. Let me first mention a couple of terms I’m using here: ‘graphs’ and ‘properties’. I’m using ‘property’ loosely to refer to the individual RDF statement (or triple) containing a property, i.

Since last month’s threads (here, here, here and here) talking about the issues involved in making the DOI a first-class identifier for linked data applications, I’ve had the chance to actually sit down with some of the thread’s participants (Tony Hammond, Leigh Dodds, Norman Paskin) and we’ve been able sketch-out some possible scenarios for migrating the DOI into a linked data world. I think that several of us were struck by how little actually needs to be done in order to fully address virtually all of the concerns that the linked data community has expressed about DOIs.

(This post is just a repost of a comment to Geoff’s last entry made because it’s already rather long, because it contains one original thought - FRBR as OSI - and because, well, it didn’t really want to wait for moderation.) Hi Geoff: First off, there is no question but that Crossref was established to take on the reference linking challenge for scholarly literature. (Hell, it’s there, as you point out, in the organization name - PILA - as well as in the application name - Crossref.

Tony’s recent thread on making DOIs play nicely in a linked data world has raised an issue I’ve meant to discuss here for some time- a lot of the thread is predicated on the idea that Crossref DOIs are applied at the abstract “work” level. Indeed, that it what it currently says in our guidelines. Unfortunately, this is a case where theory, practice and documentation all diverge. When the Crossref linking system was developed it was focused primarily on facilitating persistent linking amongst journals and conference proceedings.

(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!

(Click image for full size graphic.) Following the JISC seminar last week on persistent identifiers (#jiscpid on Twitter) there was some discussion about DOI and its role within a Linked Data context. John Erickson has responded with a very thoughtful post DOIs, URIs and Cool Resolution, which ably summarizes how the current problem with DOI in that the way the DOI is is implemented by the handle HTTP proxy may not have kept pace with actual HTTP developments.

Was outraged (outraged, I tell you) that one of my favorite online comics, PhD, didn’t include DOIs in their recent bibliography of Christmas-related citations.. So I’ve compiled them below. We care about these things so that you don’t have to. Bet you will sleep better at night knowing this. Or perhaps not… A Christmas Reading List… with DOIs. Citation: Biggs, R, Douglas, A, Macfarlane, R, Dacie, J, Pitney, W, Merskey, C & O’Brien, J, 1952, ‘Christmas Disease’, BMJ, vol.

In order to encourage publishers and other content producers to embed metadata into their PDFs, we have released an experimental tool called “pdfmark”, This open source tool allows you to add XMP metadata to a PDF. What’s really cool, is that if you give the tool a Crossref DOI, it will lookup the metadata in Crossref and then apply said metadata to the PDF. More detail can be found on the pdfmark page on the Crossref Labs site.

Inspired by Google’s recent promotion of QR Codes, I thought it might be fun to experiment with encoding a Crossref DOI and a bit of metadata into one of the critters. I’ve put a short write-up of the experiment on the Crossref Labs site, which includes a demonstration of how you can generate a QR Code for any given Crossref DOI. Put them on postcards and send them to your friends for the holidays.