Blog

Martin Fenner continues his interest in the subject of author identifiers. He recently posted an online poll asking people some specific questions about how they would like to see an author identifier implemented.* The results of the poll are in and, though the sample was very small, the results are interesting. The responses are both gratifying -there seems to be a general belief that Crossref has a roll to play here- and perplexing -most think the identifier needs to identify other “contributors” to the scholarly communications process- yet there seems to be a preference for the moniker “digital author identifier”.

So while doing some background reading today I realized that legal citations already widely support a form of “citation typing” in the form of “Introductory Signals“. The 10 introductory signals break down as follows… In support of an argument: 1) [no signal]. (NB that, apparently, this is increasingly deprecated.) 2) accord; 3) see; 4) see also; 5) cf.; For Comparisons: 6) compare … with …; For contradiction: 7) but see;

I was happy to read David Shotton’s recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing, and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology.* Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the “typed link”, a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his 1983 Ph.D. thesis.. Basically, Trigg points out something that should be fairly obvious- a citation (i.

Discussions around “contributor Ids” (aka “Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular. In the interview that I pointed to in my last post, I mentioned that Crossref has been talking with a group of researchers who were very interested in creating some sort of authenticated contributor ID as a mechanism for controlling who gets trusted access to sensitive genome-wide aggregate genotype data. Well, I’m delighted to say that said group of researchers(at the GEN2PHEN project) have created a “Researcher Identification Primer” website in which they outline the many use-cases and issues around creating a mechanism for unambiguously identifying and/or authenticating researchers.

Over the past few months there seems to have been a sharp upturn in general interest around implementing an “author identifier” system for the scholarly community. This, in turn, has meant that more people have been getting in touch with us about our nascent “Contributor ID” project. The other day, after seeing my comments in the above thread, Martin Fenner asked if he could interview me about the issue of author identifiers for his blog on Nature Networks, Gobbledygook.

Alf Eaton just posted a real nice analysis of ticTOCs RSS feeds. Good to see that almost half of the feeds (46%) are now in RDF and that fully a third (34%) are using PRISM metadata to disclose bibliographic fields. The one downside from a Crossref point of view is that these feeds are still using the old PRISM version (1.2) and not the new version (2.0) which was released a year ago and blogged here.

Very cool to see Alexander Griekspoor releasing an iPhone version of his award-winning Papers application. A while ago Alex intigrated DOI metadata lookup into the Mac version of papers and now I can get a silly thrill from seeing Crossref DOIs integrated in an iPhone app. Alex has just posted a preview video of the iPhone application and it includes a cameo appearance by a DOI. Yay.

The W3C has recently (Jan. 16) released CURIE Syntax 1.0 as a Candidate Recommendation and is inviting implementations. (Note that I made a fuller post here on CURIEs and erroneously confused the Editor’s Draft (Oct. 23, ’08) as being a Candidate Recommendation. Well, at least it’s got there now.)

IUPAC has just released the final version (1.02) of its InChI software, which generates Standard InChIs and Standard InChIKeys. (InChI is the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier.) The Standard InChI “removes options for properties such as tautomerism and stereoconfiguration”, so that a molecule will always generate the same stable identifier - a unique InChI - which facilitates “interoperability/compatibility between large databases/web searching and information exchange”. Note also that any “shortcomings in Standard InChI may be addressed using non-Standard InChI (currently obtainable using InChI version 1.

Update about new XMP Library from Adobe Labs: “The new Adobe XMP Library for ActionScript is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. XMP is an open technology based on RDF and RDF/XML. With this new library you can read existing XMP metadata from Flash based file formats via the Adobe Flash Player.