Re: Institutional Identifier (I2) comments (was: RE: Institutional Identifier Re: [Digipres] NISO Seeking Feedback on ...)

On 30 Jul 2010, at 16:48, William Waites wrote:

> On 10-07-30 16:19, ZENG, MARCIA wrote:
>> 
>> One thing I need to point out is that the standard is for institutional identifiers and those ‘metadata’ elements are for identifying the organizations.  It is not about obtaining metadata. [1] 

The organization is itself metadata (for something else) in some contexts.

>> 
>> [1]    The NISO Institutional Identifier (I2) is proposed as a globally unique, robust, scalable and interoperable identifier with the sole purpose of uniquely identifying institutions. The I2 consists of two parts
>>      * an identifier standard that includes the metadata needed to uniquely identify the organization -- including documenting relationships with other institutions that are critical for establishing identity -- and

For this identifier to be used in web contexts, and in linked data, it should be a URL.

Ideally, that URL would be populated with further information about the institution (for instance a redirect to the institution homepage, or a NISO-maintained page with metadata).

-Jodi

>>     * a framework for implementation and use. 
>> ] http://www.niso.org/workrooms/i2/midtermreport/
> 
> I admit that when I read this in the report I had trouble parsing it.
> 
> Surely there needs to be some way, given an identifier, to obtain
> the metadata. Otherwise it would be rather hard to use it to
> identify the organisations.
> 
> They do seem to be somewhat conscious of the need to do this:
> The Working Group is also tasked with the implementation of the 
> identifier, including identifying the host and technical needs [...]
> I take this to mean that they intend to operate the registry that
> will have some sort of network interface...
> 
> If they don't mint URIs that dereference to the metadata, sooner
> or later someone else is going to do it. Then we'll have a bunch
> of non-authoritative sets of URIs pointing to the same thing 
> with varying qualities and reliability. There's a chance to avoid
> the mess if they do this from the start.
> 
> Cheers,
> -w
> -- 
> William Waites           <william.waites@okfn.org>
> Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
> Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK
> 
> RDF Indexing, Clustering and Inferencing in Python
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