Re: DOI and other identifiers

Whatever you guys decide, I hope it will nudge annotators toward using a
persistently resolvable unique identifier or something easily "append-able
to" or "absorbable by" an identifier in a system of persistently resolvable
unique identifiers.

Another benefit of a system like the IDF's is that it is likely to have
figured out rights issues (e.g., paywalls), which may be useful in dealing
with the knotty one of  "allowing vs disallowing" annotations.

One for consultation with Bob Kahn and Larry Lanham?

On Sunday, 8 May 2016, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi Dan,
>
> I find your arguments below compelling. It did come up elsewhere in the
> thread whether annotations couldn't be born with DOI-s in the first place,
> but I am not sure it is realistic (although worth exploring).
>
> Where do we go from here? But let us *explore* what it would mean to add
> something for this into the model. The main issue, I believe, is that we
> should certainly not concentrate on DOI-s only. DOI-s are used in a very
> particular area (scholarly publishing) and ignored in other areas (eg, book
> publishing). While annotations are not books, ie, they would not get an
> ISBN, we cannot exclude that, in some other areas, we get other identifier
> schemes of that sort. Ie, the extension to the model should look like
> (make-up terms for now):
>
> "externalIdentifier" : {
> "authority" : "e.g. DOI",
> "identifier": "the DOI assigned to the annotation"
> }
>
> The system should treat an "externalIdentifier" just like it does for
> canonical identifier insofar as it must not change it, it is some sort of a
> metadata that is carried with the annotation. Also, the model could allow
> for several external identifiers by giving an array of such structures.
>
> Of course, the problem is the 'authority' term. There may be many of
> those. There *are* many of those. How do we identify them? Are there
> canonical (sic!) identifiers or terms for them? How should we define/find
> those? These are not obvious issues when it comes for interoperability.
>
> B.t.w., the IDPF EPUB3.1 WG is facing the same issue right now: how to
> define the various identifiers that an EPUB may have. The current,
> proposed, approach (with a different syntax) is that IDPF sets up a
> registry for the authorities, ie, a list where terms like "DOI", "ISBN",
> etc, are listed and mapped on URI-s that describe those. I do not mean we
> should set up such registry but, after all, we may also declare that we use
> the IDPF registry (the only caveat is that I am not sure when that registry
> will become operational, but that is more of a process issue).
>
> I am not sure we would want to go down that route; maybe what I just
> outlined should fall into the realm of extension to the current vocabulary
> (thereby following Doug's approach as he mentioned on the call), ie, not
> something the group has to do now. We can add this as an informative
> example for an extension into the document, and leave it there for now
> (with a possible inclusion into a V2). I am undecided at this point, I must
> admit.
>
> Ivan
>
>
> On 7 May 2016, at 13:04, Dan Whaley <dwhaley@hypothes.is
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','dwhaley@hypothes.is');>> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>
>
>>
>> * 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.
>
>
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C
> Digital Publishing Lead
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
> mobile: +31-641044153
> ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Robert Bolick
Books On Books <http://books-on-books.com/> site
My Profile <http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/robert-bolick/4/8bb/ba2> site
OrcID <http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9543-3551>