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

[Eric Hellman <eric@hellman.net>]

At 1:31 PM -0800 3/23/99, Godfrey Rust wrote:
>If I use the name Tony Hammond and you later come along and tell me that it
>really
>refers to Eric Hellman, all transactions I have based on it are, or may be,
>invalid. If
>you give a DOI to something and I think its a digital manifestation and you
>later
>come along and tell me its a work, the same applies. The point of the
>"kernel" was
>to give DOIs some reliable meaning. If the number is dumb and the metadata is
>changeable, we have nothing but a dumb number and our own best guesses. I
>realise
>of course that in a local environment among people who generally mean the
>same things
>by what they say, this is not completely useless. But DOI's policy goes far
>beyond that; and
>even in the local environment of journal articles there seems to be
>sufficient confusion
>about what is or should be being identified that it makes sense to pin it
>down and stick to a
>few rules and guidelines.
>
>Godfrey

But a book may be authored by Hillary Rodham, and then later I tell you
that it's Hillary Clinton. (Proving the need for identifiers!)

I agree that in almost any concrete situation, it will not be so difficult
to  decide on the primary classification type. However, here's the
conundrum: if work/digital/physical/performance is to be included in the
identifier syntax, then what do we do if:
1. The messy real world forces a reclassification (George Harrison's "My
Sweet Lord" is really a manifestation of someone else's song.)
2. Different genre judge a cross-genre object to fall in different primary
classes.

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

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