[Ref-Links] RE: [Discuss-DOI] DOI & Identity Of

["Paskin, Norman (ELS)" <n.paskin@elsevier.co.uk>]

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Tony asks: " Is it [ a DOI entity] what it purports to be (Can one tell this
purely from the metadata that might be deposited along with the DOI)?"

The purpose of the metadata to be associated with a DOI is to unambiguously
"constitute descriptive information sufficient to identify the entity"
(this is taken from the IDF's metadata policy commitee recommendations**).
So the answer to Tony's question should be "yes".  As Tony points out
though, the quality/reliability of this answer will depend on the source of
the data (as with any look up service or directory).  The DOI-X prototype is
currently building a reverse look up facility which will enable us to test
in practice some of these issues.  The question of wider use of distributed
metadata, embodied in header information of the entitiy (XML and ultimately
RDF?) is I think an essential area for IDF to develop and investigate, but
this will undoubtedly take time and effort. 

-----Original Message-----
From: tony_hammond@harcourt.com [mailto:tony_hammond@harcourt.com]
Sent: 26 August 1999 15:57
To: discuss-doi@doi.org; ref-links@doi.org
Subject: [Discuss-DOI] DOI & Identity Of




Just throwing this out for comments, but does anyone have any take on the
desirability of interrogating a given DOI for its identity. Is it what it
purports to be? (Can one tell this purely from the metadata that might be
deposited along with the DOI. The DOI has to be assumed to be opaque - ie
"dumb"
-  although where legacy identifiers are used there may be some possibility
of
correlating with the metadata. Though I wouldn't use this as an argument for
legacy identifiers :-) And again even if a correlation were established this
may
well tell us nothing about the resolution data elements.)

With multi-valued, multi-typed resolution (Level 2 DOI) one primitive
service
might be to implement an identity (or sanity) check on a given resolution
data
element. That is, if I have a DOI as

     10.1006/geno.1999.1234

does it in fact identify what 10.1006/geno.1999.1234 should identify or is
it to
be read "de facto" as the correct identifier?

With the current single-valued, single-typed - ie, URL - resolution (Level 1
DOI) the only service supported is an HTTP GET. However, one way to
implement
the effect of this might be to include the identifier somewhere in the text
of
the page but more reasonably as a metadata field within the content header.
This
does have the advantage of being readily parsed and may be useful in
validating
a "ping" test - especially if there were some recommendation of best
practice.
(An HTTP status of "200 (OK)" proves nothing about the contents of the
page.)

Of course, it could also be argued that whatever system generates the DOI
might
generate the identical identifier as an integral metadata element and so we
would be no closer to learning the intended identity. (I think we still have
the
same problem even as far as certificates are concerned.)

Or is this just a blind. The DOI identifies whatever the metadata claim -
fact -
but the resolution data elements (hence services) could possibly go awry -
something like printing the wrong ISBN on a book. (Assuming that there is a
clear separation between metadata and resolution data.)

Tony




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