Month: February 2008

ISO/CD 26324 (DOI)

Following on from my previous post about prism:doi I didn’t mention, or reference, the ongoing ISO work on DOI, Indeed I hadn’t realized that the DOI site now has a status update on the ISO work:

“The DOI® System is currently being standardised through ISO. It is expected that the process will be finalised during 2008. In December 2007 the Working Group for this project approved a final draft as a Committee Draft (standard for voting) which is now being processed by ISO. Copies of the Committee Draft (SC9N475) and an accompanying explanatory document detailing issues dealt with during the standards process (SC9N474) are provided here for information.

Committee Draft 26324 is subject to ISO’s copyright and is for information only to those interested in the project; it may not be re-distributed. This is currently undergoing the formal ISO voting process; the deadline for comments on CD 26324 from TC46/SC9’s national bodies is April 25, 2008: please contact your national member of ISO TC46/SC9 if you would like it contribute to comments on this draft standard. Other documents for the ISO DOI Working Group are available on a DOI Project Register.”

prism:doi

The new PRISM spec (v. 2.0) was published this week, see the press release. (Downloads are available here.)
This is a significant development as there is support for XMP profiles, to complement the existing XML and RDF/XML profiles. And, as PRISM is one of the major vocabularies being used by publishers, I would urge you all to go take a look at it and to consider upgrading your applications to using it.
One caveat. There’s a new element prism:doi (PRISM Namespace, 4.2.13) which sits alongside another new element prism:url (PRISM Namespace, 4.2.55). Unfortunately the prism:doi element is shown to take DOI proxy URL as its value – and not the DOI string itself, e.g.

  • Model #1
    <prism:doi rdf:resource=”http://dx.doi.org/10.1030/03054”/>
  • Model #2
    <prism:doi>http://dx.doi.org/10.1030/03054</prism:doi>”

This seems to me to just plain wrong. The DOI in itself is not a URL (or URI) – although can, and should, be represented in URI form when used in Web contexts (i.e. pretty much most of the time). As a literal it should be used in its native form as specified in ANSI/NISO Z39.84 – 2005 Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier. This would only satisfy Model #2 above.
To satisfy Model #1 above a URI form for DOI would be required. And this is not the service URI denoted by the proxy. It would either have to be:

  • Model #1 – Registered URI Form
    <prism:doi rdf:resource=”info:doi/10.1030/03054”/>
  • Model #1 – Unregistered URI Form
    <prism:doi rdf:resource=”doi:10.1030/03054”/>

Any comments? Some guidelines from CrossRef would be useful – although maybe further discussion is required. It is, of course, a constant bugbear that “doi:” remains an unregistered URI scheme.

Added XML format parameter to CrossRef’s OpenURL resolver

From the beginning our OpenURL resolver has had a non standard feature of returning metadata in response to a request instead of redirecting to the referrent. This feature returned one of our older XML formats which is a bit limited as to the fields it contains.
Sometime after our resolver was deployed we introduced a more verbose XML format for DOI metadata called ‘UNIXREF”. This was always available to regular queries against the CrossRef system but was never introduced to the OpenURL resolver (for no particular reason).
We’ve since learned that some user’s are relying on the OpenURL’s metadata feature to build proper references in situations where they have a DOI and that the older XML format is insufficient. Therefor I’ve added a ‘format’ parameter to our OpenURL resolver which allows one to request the more verbose UNIXREF. (see www.crossref.org/openurl)
As always please feel free to contact us regarding new features or changes to existing features that might be helpful.
Regards,
Chuck

CrossRef Citation Plugin (for WordPress)

OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.
And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.
Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.

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