ORCID no longer relevant?

In my projects, we have been wanting to recommend using ORCID [1] as
part of identifying authors and contributors. ORCID is receiving
increasing attention in the scientific publishing community as it
promises a unified way to identify authors of scientific publications.


I was going to include an ex:orcid property on foaf:Agents in our
specifications, perhaps as an owl:sameAs subproperty (I know, I
know!).

There's no official property for linking to a ORCID profile at the
moment [5] - I would be careful about using foaf:account to the ORCID
URI, as the ORCID identifies the person (at least in a scientific
context), and not an OnlineAccount - has someone else tried a
structure here?



There are other long-standing issues in using ORCID in Linked Data:


For one, the URI to use is unclear [2], but the form
<http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718> is what is currently being
promoted [3]:

> The ORCID iD should always be expressed and stored as a URI: http://orcid.org/xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx (with the protocol (http://), and with hyphens in the number xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx).

(Strangely this advise is not reflected on orcid.org itself)


Another issue is that there is actually no RDF exposed from orcid.org [4].


But the last issue is that if you request the ORCID URI with Accept:
application/rdf+xml - then the REST API wrongly returns its own XML
format - but still claims Content-Type application/rdf+xml.  The issue
for this [5] has just been postponed 'for several months', even though
it should be a simple fix.


This raises the question if ORCIDs would still be relevant on the
semantic web. Does anyone else have views, alternatives or
suggestions?



[1] http://orcid.org/
[2] http://support.orcid.org/forums/175591-orcid-ideas-forum/suggestions/3641532
[3] http://support.orcid.org/knowledgebase/articles/116780-structure-of-the-orcid-identifier
[4] http://support.orcid.org/forums/175591-orcid-ideas-forum/suggestions/3283848
[5] http://support.orcid.org/forums/175591-orcid-ideas-forum/suggestions/3291844


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester

Received on Tuesday, 12 March 2013 11:22:35 UTC