Re: [Discuss-DOI] Reference Linking: A Note on Syntax

[Eric Hellman <eric@hellman.net>]

At 2:23 PM +0000 3/22/99, tony_hammond@harcourtbrace.com wrote:
>Appendix 2 of the paper "DOIs used for reference linking"  introduces a
>syntactic convention which purports to simplify the use of DOIs. Leaving aside
>the thornier issue of whether we really need to assign DOIs to Creations (or
>Works) - virtual things (ghosts?) which have no tangible existence and hence
>cannot be experienced/consumed/enjoyed or in any sense known, I would like to
>suggest that the proposed syntax is imperfectly conceived.
>

I agree with Tony here. The distinction between a digital, physical, and
abstract works (aren't we forgetting "Spiritual"?) is increasingly
arbitrary.

Ink on paper is very much a digital manifestation; pits on a slab of PMMA
are atoms. When I get a videotape, I'm actually purchasing a license to
play (perform) it in my house.

Distinctions such as these only encourage the assignment of multiple
identifiers to resources that for many applications should have one and
only one identifier. It's fine to try to make these distinctions in a
concrete metadata vocabulary, but I see no use for having them in the
identifier syntax.

>Syntactically, the SICI is a disaster. While version 2 was standardized in
>1996,
>it really belongs to an older time. It is based on ASCII. It is written in
>English. It is true that it can be transported via SMTP, but it requires hex
>encoding if used as a URI in HTTP, and it requires entifying if packaged
>within
>SGML/XML instances. The SICI is over-specialized.

Tony, I recently finished implementing SICI-1 and SICI-2 in Java. Or at
least I implemented thase parts of SICI which are implementable. With that
experience, I would say the same things as you say, but I would say them
less politely.


Eric
Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           Tools for 21st Century Scholarly Publishing

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