Re: ORCID no longer relevant?

Hi all. Thanks a bunch to @hvdsomp for highlighting this discussion on Twitter earlier.

Here's a collective response from the ORCID camp, which includes Laure (executive director), Laura (technical director),  Rob (lead developer), myself and others involved in day-to-day operations in one way or another. 


First, on a purely technical level,  Stian's absolutely correct that the central ORCID systemis misbehaving by stating it's returning RDF, when it's actually responding with XML. I'll submit a bug report and try and push to get this fixed ASAP, to avoid further confusion. Actually, strike that: looks like Rob is already on it (see Github info below).

Second,  concerning RDF support more generally, we are aware that Linked Data interop is becoming increasingly important.  There have been  discussions around this topic within the ORCID project but, as noted earlier on this thread, there simply isn't bandwidth to address this need right now. ORCID plans to start working on RDF requirements later this year, and welcomes community input into the process.

Highly relevant to this, a major recent development is that ORCID's code is now open source and the community can participate in helping to address issues such as this one. More info here:

http://orcid.org/blog/2013/02/21/orcid-open-source
http://orcid.org/about/community/orcid-technical-community
https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source <-- for those who like to get straight to the business of coding!  

Also, this just arrived from Github:

On 12.3.2013, at 17:47, Robert Peters <notifications@github.com> wrote:  
> Subject: [ORCID-Source] Stop matching wild on wild card (#40)

> Pushing this out early just so external people can see what is going on. 
>.
> 1) Still need to do some nginx work on production 
> 2) Still need to do more integration testing. 
  ...
> Or view, comment on, or merge it at:  
> https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source/pull/40 




Hope this helps!



Don't hesitate to get in touch, either directly (Laure <l.haak@orcid.org>, Laura <l.paglione@orcid.org>, Rob <r.peters@orcid.org> or myself) or via the feedback/support website at http://support.orcid.org .


Best regards, 


                Mummi

-- 
 Gudmundur A. Thorisson, PhD
 Project manager, ORCID - http://orcid.org | ODIN project - http://odin-project.eu
 Project manager, Institute of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Iceland - http://luvs.hi.is
 Open Access Iceland - http://opinnadgangur.is
 http://gthorisson.name | http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5635-1860 | http://twitter.com/gthorisson



On 12.3.2013, at 17:01, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Stian Soiland-Reyes <soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> (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.
> 
> It's just an error. They can and will fix it, I'm sure - they are pretty new and I expect overburdened at the moment. Have you all made sure that they have received the feedback (and suggested resolution) through the appropriate channels?
>  
> 
> 
> > 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?).
> 
> Well, you have shown a use that is not that. But that doesn't define how it will in fact be interpreted.  
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> It needs to go as deep as necessary. But certainly knowing that these are identifers for foaf:Person's, and there will be no more than one per foaf:Person solves much of the issue. Note, however, that foaf itself is a bit problematic, as the doc says a foaf:Person can be imaginary, and a) I don't know what an imaginary person is b) I don't think ORCID contemplates imaginary researchers - how would an imaginary person claim their ORCID?
>  
> 
> (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 don't understand this comment. I don't want to get into too much of a conversation about PROV, but clearly, in the world we live in, that "specialization" is still the same Person. I would therefore expect there to be one, not two ORCIDs even though there are two "web" instances. 
> 
> 
> > 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" .
> 
> 
> Looks reasonable to me.
> 
>  
> 
> ?
> 
> 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.
> 
> Sure. "The PersonalProfileDocument class represents those things that are a Document, and that use RDF to describe properties of the person who is the maker of the document. There is just one Person described in the document, ie. the person who made it and who will be its primaryTopic."
> 
> But you can make other classes of document that are like PersonalProfileDocument but without the constraint that the document creator is the same as the primary topic. PersonalProfileDocument would be subclass of those class. You (or foaf) could even add an axiom that says all instances of PersonalProfileDocument are created by the same as the primary topic. You would then have a clear differentia between your broader class and PersonalProfileDocument
> 
> Regards,
> Alan
>  
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
> School of Computer Science
> The University of Manchester
>

Received on Tuesday, 12 March 2013 18:22:00 UTC