Kingsley, Encouraging attribution by URI is a bad idea because it encourages people or organizations to create URIs where perfectly good ones exist, solely so that they can get their "attribution". Were this no cost, I wouldn't mind. But having more than one URI for a resource causes real trouble for data integration. Incidentally, there is a legal difference between attribution and citation. Virtually all of academic credit is based on citation, not attribution. Attribution is the kind of thing one gives as the result of a license requirement in exchange for permission to copy. In the academic world for journal articles this doesn't come into play at all, since there is no copying (in the usual case). Instead people cite articles because the norms of their community demand it. -Alan
Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 20:14:33 UTC