- From: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 15:34:18 +0100
- To: Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>
- Cc: Sebastian Hellmann <hellmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>, Linking Open Data <public-lod@w3.org>
Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk> writes: >> Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk> writes: >>>> I am not completely familiar with DOI. Am I right, that it more or less >>>> provides the same service as http://purl.org . >>>> DOI links on the resource-level. You would still need frag ids to link to parts. >>>> Firefox can actually handle this: >>>> http://dx.doi.org/10.1038%2Fscientificamerican1210-80#atl >>> >>> It's not the same thing as purl.org. >> >> The mechanism by which DOIs and purls are resolved is more or less >> identical. Under the hood, DOIs use handles, purl.org uses a triple >> store. In practice, users don't interact with either directly. > > Well, yes and no. The distinction I was thinking about was that PURLs are > _defined_ in terms of an HTTP redirect (the triple store behind it is an > implementation detail), whereas DOIs are defined in terms of the underlying, > distributed, Handle system. There, the dx.doi.org URL is 'just' a convenience > layer on top of the 'real' API. They are, indeed, although as far as I can see, in general, the only people who interact with the handle system are people like crossref and datacite. So, while I accept this point, I think it doesn't make any difference. > I don't think this is just a quibble, because this, plus the different > sustainability model, effectively gives the DOIs different persistence > properties from PURLs. Whether those different properties are _practically_ > different is of course a different question. Myself, I'm broadly doubtful that > there's a massive practical difference; but although I'm unpersuaded by it, I > can see the force of the argument that the DOI sustainability model is of > crucial importance. I think, here, you need to separate the organisational details from the technical ones. DOIs are all run by the DOI foundation. But there are 8 different registration authorities, and they have different models. None the less, there is a degree to which the DOI comes in built with a social contract. PURLs, on the other hand, do not. So, the PURLz server at www.purl.org, the one at purl.bioontology.org and the one that I run on my local machine so I can play with it, all have very different contracts. >From the social point of view, comparing DOI with PURL doesn't make sense. You need to compare, DOIs from mEDRA, with the PURL server at purl.bioontology.org. > The other argument for DOIs is that 'http:' refers to a transport protocol, > which is being hijacked as an identifier scheme, and will presumably be > replaced by whatever replaces HTTP over the coming decades. I think this > argument, also, is initially attractive but unpersuasive in detail, but it > doesn't even arise for 'doi:', which is an identifier scheme by definition. Also, I agree unpersuasive. First, the standard guidelines for display of (CrossRef) dois now says "http://dx.doi.org/10.xxxx"; so even if this is widely ignored, and change of http:// to pantp:// (Phil's all-new-transport-protocol) would affect this also. Second, because if http: ever changes and becomes less popular, it will happen slowly and have so many effects that a general solution would be found. >>>> If I am right, DOI also wouldn't be able to provide links to the 40 >>>> million mentions contained in the Wiki links corpus: >>>> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/google-research-releases-wikilinks-corpus-with-40m-mentions-and-3m-entities/ >>>> That's 40 million DOIs .... >>> >>> I don't there would be such DOIs, unless someone has spent quite a lot of money registering them. >> >> >> A purl would be much better in this case anyway, since purls support >> partial redirection, which to my knowledge, DOIs do not. With DOIs you >> would need 40 million DOIs. With purls, you would create a single >> partial redirect purl and handle the rest locally. > > I've been on the fringes of Datacite discussions, so don't know the fully > up-to-date details, but I believe that one of the use-cases, in discussions > about the pricing structure, is the case where someone _does_ want to register > millions of DOIs per year (or billions: what about a DOI for every LHC > event?). I _think_ the resolution to the 40M DOIs question is "don't do that, > then", but the question has crossed the Datacite people's minds, and the > different Datacite registries have (I understand) different pricing models for > different DOI volumes. Or an effectively infinite number of DOIs -- you can do this with PURLs, but not with DOIs. At this scale, DOIs do not work, because they are preregistered. PURLs do just fine, since with a partial redirect and a deterministic algorithm, you can create them lazily. Phil
Received on Friday, 10 May 2013 14:34:42 UTC