Re: DOI and other identifiers

On Sat, May 7, 2016, 11:07 Dan Whaley <dwhaley@hypothes.is> wrote:

> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> All,
>>
>> On the call today we briefly discussed the use of other identifiers for
>> annotations, such as DOIs.
>>
>> While there's no problem assigning a DOI to an Annotation, assuming that
>> CrossRef or some other registration agency is willing to manage the
>> potential drastic increase in registrations, there are some questions it
>> brings up for the working group.
>>
>
> While I think the number of DOIs would certainly increase (if scholarly
> annotation takes off) I imagine that DOIs would only be issued on request,
> not 1:1 for all annotations created.
>

Why not mint a DOI for every annotation? You already give it a unique
identifier and derive a URL that contains it.


>
>>
>> * Is the DOI the canonical identifier for the Annotation?
>>
>
> So I may be off base here, but I think there are perhaps two different
> senses of the word "canonical" at play here.
>
> From an annotation systems perspective, it seems unlikely that the DOI is
> ever going to be canonical in the sense that it becomes the *primary
> identifier* replacing the one we minted originally.  We'll want to use a
> consistent identifier for all our annotations internally, not different
> ones depending on whether a DOI was issued.  (What if someone captured the
> URL of the annotation *prior* to the DOI issuance?  We can't ourselves fail
> to resolve the "old" address of the annotation.)  I assume there may even
> be performance issues underlying this.  This is perhaps more true of
> annotation systems than regular publications because annotations would be
> born without DOIs and presumably get them later, and I'm not imagining that
> would change.  Otherwise we'd be issuing DOIs for every trivial annotation
> from inception, and that indeed would be massive.
>

All of this paragraph seems to be conclusions based on the earlier
assumption that annotations are "born without DOIs".


> Even assuming a DOI has been issued for an annotation, if someone else
> comes along and wants to tweet out the same annotation, and exposes our
> share dialog to get the link, are they going to care whether there is a
> DOI, and if there is one, is that the one that they necessarily want to
> use? (I'm presuming if a DOI was issued, we'd show both the original style,
> and also the DOI side by side) The tweeter doesn't really care about
> permanence, and they'd probably just opt for the link style they're
> familiar with (in our case, hyp.is/<TOKEN>).  That one will also be more
> performant since it doesn't have to go through a resolver first.
>

The hyp.is service is a resolver, it just resolves your tokens rather than
DOIs.

The differences with DOIs are that your redirect would not be branded and,
as is the function of A DOI, not dependant upon your continued ownership
and operation of the hyp.is or hypothes.is domains.

Why assume someone tweeting would prefer one or the other and doesn't care
about permanence?

>