Re: ORCID no longer relevant?

As I mentioned, ORCID is a subset of ISNI (functionally). ISNI identifies "public entities" - the name of the person. So, just to use a pop-culture analogy, Lady Gaga and Stefani Germanotta would have two different ISNIs (one is the performer, the other is the composer, according to liner notes). Stephen King and Richard Bachman would have two different ISNIs, even though they are the same person. My understanding is that ORCID is structured similarly - however, it's very rare that a scientist or researcher will be operating under multiple names, so for *practical* purposes the ORCID pretty much identifies the person. Not the profile.

From: Jonathan A Rees <rees@mumble.net<mailto:rees@mumble.net>>
To: Stian Soiland-Reyes <soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk<mailto:soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk>>
Cc: "public-lod@w3.org<mailto:public-lod@w3.org>" <public-lod@w3.org<mailto:public-lod@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: ORCID no longer relevant?

Remember it took a while for DOIs to become linked-data-friendly.
I suspect ORCID has limited staff that is swamped with work and LD is not a priority for them.
I say give them a year or two to get up to speed and in the meantime continue to submit bug reports.

It's not clear to me whether they identify profiles or people (or something else). Might be a good idea to figure that out before using the URIs in RDF.

Jonathan

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Stian Soiland-Reyes <soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk<mailto:soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk>> wrote:
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<http://orcid.org> itself)


Another issue is that there is actually no RDF exposed from orcid.org<http://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