January 26, 2007
A conversation with Tony Hammond about digital object identifiers
Posted by Jon Udell under UncategorizedTony Hammond works with the new technology team at Nature Publishing Group. His company publishes a flock of scientific journals in print and online including, most prominently, Nature. It also operates Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists. In this week’s podcast we talk about digital object identifiers which are, in effect, super-URLs designed to survive commercial churn and to work reliably for hundreds of years.
Many of us are becoming publishers nowadays, and we’d like to imagine that all our stuff could enjoy that level of consistency and durability. Few of us are prepared to make the necessary investment, but it’s interesting to hear from someone who has.
January 26, 2007 at 10:15 pm
As mentioned briefly in the podcast, DOI is an implementation of the CNRI Handle System. Another implementation is DSpace:
http://www.google.com/search?q=dspace
http://www.dspace.org/
The DSpace software however goes beyond just ‘addressing’ and also handles preservation, indexing, distribution, etc.
January 26, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Wow. Thanks for that, David. Do you think the capabilities of that class of software will find their way into blogging infrastructure anytime soon?
January 27, 2007 at 4:21 pm
A weblog (or web pages in general) are simply a collection text, link, pictures. This is no different than any other document / object / entity that Dspace would handle. It’d simply be another type of CMS IMHO. I think this would be a really good project to implement for an undergrad thesis, or perhaps as part of a master’s thesis.
However as neat as all this is, I don’t think it would be implemented soon: or at least not in mainstream software. Few people will care whether their MySpace page survives over the aeons (and many people don’t want their kids to know what they did twenty years in the past).
February 4, 2007 at 8:13 am
Beyond the personal desire to preserve one’s digital history…blogs are driving, and reflecting, a new chapter in human history.
The preserved blogosphere is likely to be a valuable rosetta stone for future archeologists and anthropologists…human, post-human, and…well, who knows?
February 4, 2007 at 8:30 am
Jon, interestingly, your robots.txt prevents all crawlers accessing the whole of your blog, so it’s highly unlikely to be a part of any publicly accessible persistent blogosphere. The main capture mechanism for such a facility to be realised is a web archiving crawler, examples are Internet Archive and Hanzoweb - both of which respect robots. It’s a pity. Please consider revising this policy, I’m sure your blog will be of value to future readers, future historians, researchers and the like.
February 4, 2007 at 11:28 am
“robots.txt prevents all crawlers”
Whoa, thanks for noticing that! I hadn’t even occurred to me that the wordpress.com default would be to block rather than allow crawlers. I’ve changed that — in Options -> Privacy in case anyone’s in the same boat. I’d have thought the change would be immediate but it appears not to have taken effect yet. I’ll keep an eye on it.
Thanks so much for noticing!
Ironically this is a perfect illustration of the problem identified here:
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/02/who-can-see-which-parts-of-my-published-surface-area/
Namely, the difficulty of visualizing one’s published surface area!
February 4, 2007 at 11:46 am
[...] lesson in surface area visibility Filed under: Uncategorized — Jon Udell @ 11:46 am A comment from Mark Middleton perfectly illustrates the point I was making the other day about visualizing [...]
February 13, 2007 at 10:20 pm
[...] A conversation with Tony Hammond about digital object identifiers « Jon Udell “Many of us are becoming publishers nowadays, and we’d like to imagine that all our stuff could enjoy that level of consistency and durability. Few of us are prepared to make the necessary investment, but it’s interesting to hear from someone who has. (tags: judell doi identifier url uri dns tags connotea archive longnow good podcast listened publishing library swhpl object id links resolver resolution name naming) [...]
February 16, 2007 at 5:24 pm
[...] — Jon Udell @ 5:07 pm Today’s podcast with Dan Chudnov is a sequel to my earlier podcast with Tony Hammond about the Nature Publishing Group’s use of digital object identifiers. I invited Dan to [...]
February 19, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Jon,
Given the weight of comments you must deal with, I am less than hopeful that you’ll see this - and yet I surge on…I just post a rather long interview with Stephen Downes on my site (http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/2007/02/a_little_while_.html)concerning the issue of DOIs, HANDLEs and so on. I would LOVE it if you had a chance to stop by and see the points that Stephen raises - I work in the e-learning field and this topic is very much front and center in my world.
the Eternal Optimist
Mark Oehlert
February 19, 2007 at 10:06 pm
“I would LOVE it if you had a chance to stop by and see the points that Stephen raises”
I’ve done so. Thanks for posting that excellent exchange. I don’t think I’m yet qualified to say much about it, though. As I talk to various people — Tony Hammond, Dan Chudnov, hopefully also Stephen Downes and others over time — the best I can do is try to feel out rough contours of the elephant I am poking and prodding. And this cluster of issues makes for one really big elephant!
My own parochial view of all this is colored by my (apparently offbeat) interest in our newfound ability to narrate our lives and our work online, and how that will create demand for a class of services that in the past only institutions would want and could pay for. The democratization of such services is mostly orthogonal to DRM, I think, because the purposes of such narration are best served when it is freely (and reliably and durably) accessible.
March 25, 2007 at 12:16 pm
[...] all. But why shouldn’t it become more and more that way, and why shouldn’t we try? Like Jon Udell, i’d like my web writing to remain valuable for as long as feasible, given my modest [...]
April 9, 2007 at 1:46 pm
[...] scholarly and professional publishing revolves around reliable citation. In previous podcasts with Tony Hammond and Dan Chudnov I’ve explored some of the technologies and methods used by these publishers [...]
May 22, 2007 at 12:07 pm
[...] the business side, my conversations with Tony Hammond and Geoffrey Bilder have given me a glimpse of how these issues are being approached in the world [...]
June 27, 2007 at 5:28 pm
[...] A conversation with Tony Hammond about digital object identifiers [...]
September 3, 2007 at 3:41 am
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November 20, 2007 at 5:52 pm
[...] and references on the subject if you are new to it, from a podcast I listened to : http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/01/26/a-conversation-with-tony-hammond-about-digital-object-identifier... http://www.nature.com/index.html Robust Referencing, at an abstract level, of a work. Not tied to a [...]
March 10, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Want to direct your attenion to ISEN.org, a type of DOI assigned to the interface to a database.