Re: ORCID no longer relevant?

(Thanks anyone for helpful comments!)

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Alan Ruttenberg
<alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not to be too much of a stickler, but that isn't a spec, and isn't a clear
> statement. For instance the scope of "unique" isn't clear, and I can, with
> little effort, imagine a scenario where that uniqueness means that no two
> researchers have the same identifier (but can have more than one), but they
> identify names, and that the "transparent" method is that they have
> equivalences among the names.

Just to clarify ; ORCIDs are (at least now) claimed by authors
themselves, so for instance me (as on
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718 ) covers both publications by
"Stian Soiland-Reyes" and my previous name "Stian Soiland" (which is
listed as 'Also known as').

Now unlike the various J Smith's, I'm quite lucky in that my new name
is (so far!) unique in the world, but without ORCID there could be
trouble ahead if my son (same initial S) would become a scientist.



> As for the comments about ORCIDS not being suitable for linked data, that is
> a very narrow view. Having a large system of person identifiers that many
> organizations agree they will use means that there's the possibility of
> linking what the people do very easily. That ORCID itself doesn't supply
> resolvable URIs (yet) doesn't mean that others can't use those identifiers
> when publishing information as linked data. And if they do it will be very
> very useful.

Exactly, this is why we want to use ORCID! :)

The current problem is that the URIs ARE resolvable, and they DO claim
to return application/rdf+xml although it is not - so it seems like a
bit of a disconnect with the whole web architecture regardless of them
exposing RDF or not.


> So back to clarification. We need to know what the ORCID identifies
> (pair(name, person) or person), and what the definitive URI is for that
> ORCID. (let's have one case be UO1)

I agree that both of these should be clearly specified by ORCID.  It
is not the pair with the name, as I have shown for my own profile; but
it's unclear if an ORCID identifies a person (me) or a scientist (ie.
could I put my ORCID as the creator of my family photos?).


I know such nitpicking that could go very deep ("me yesterday with a
red t-shirt!") - but some clarification is needed to know if we can
call them foaf:Person's or just something related to such persons.

(For instance, W3C PROV has the concept of prov:specializationOf which
could be appropriate on a prov:Person, for instance when the person
prov:actedOnBehalfOf an organization.
http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/#specializationOf - in this model the
ORCID URI can still identify an agent).


> I would then expect many other groups to publish information whose
> foaf:primaryTopic is what the above URI identifies.

OK.. so to take Kingsleys example you would expect my server
example.com (which has nothing to do with orcid) to say:


> GET http://example.com/stian.rdf HTTP/1.1

200 OK HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/turtle

<> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument ;
  foaf:primaryTopic <http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718> ;

<http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718> a foaf:Person ;
   foaf:name "Stian Soiland-Reyes" .

?

I thought a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument was one which foaf:maker was
its foaf:primaryTopic. Now I feel I can't go and make "personal" FOAF
profiles for people I find in ORCID - so I can do the above in my own
FOAF file, but I can't do that when I simply want to talk about
someone else.



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

Received on Tuesday, 12 March 2013 16:49:24 UTC