bioGUID
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Identifiers are a hot topic in academic publishing. We have article identifiers, but we need stable identifiers for authors and institutions too. More on author identifiers in another posting. But there's a need for identifiers for lots of other kinds of resources too. If we have an identifier for a resource then we can link to it and share metadata about it.
bioGUID is an attempt to provide "resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications, taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens".
The system currently supports DOIs, PubMed identifiers, Handles, and GenBank sequences amongst other identifier schemes. Under the hood all the information is available as RDF. Linking to, for example, an organism we can find related links, bookmark the organism on del.icio.us, and view its location on a map.
Collections of identifiers like bioGUID will become key jumping off points in the growing web of data. These "linking hubs" will provide navigational aids to both humans and machines; tieing distributed data sets and collections into a larger hypertext system will have numerous benefits, not least of which will be making it easier to find stuff.
Web 2.0 is really the collective realization that it's the humble link that is the powerhouse of the internet.
bioGUID is an attempt to provide "resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications, taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens".
The system currently supports DOIs, PubMed identifiers, Handles, and GenBank sequences amongst other identifier schemes. Under the hood all the information is available as RDF. Linking to, for example, an organism we can find related links, bookmark the organism on del.icio.us, and view its location on a map.
Collections of identifiers like bioGUID will become key jumping off points in the growing web of data. These "linking hubs" will provide navigational aids to both humans and machines; tieing distributed data sets and collections into a larger hypertext system will have numerous benefits, not least of which will be making it easier to find stuff.
Web 2.0 is really the collective realization that it's the humble link that is the powerhouse of the internet.
Labels: "institutional identifier", bioGUID, identifiers, RDF
posted by Leigh Dodds at 10:51 am
eye/to/eye: our latest publisher newsletter just mailed
A quick note to let you know that our latest newsletter for publishers just mailed on Monday. It can be accessed at http://eyetoeye.ingenta.com/publisher/ - this issue includes:
- our appointment of Leigh Dodds as Ingenta CTO
- further news on our merger with VISTA
- an overview of institutional registry and identifier models, following OCLC's recent announcement that it has thrown its hat into this ring
- review of our Publisher Forum, held in December and addressing issues relating to "Information Industry Vectors: where next for technology & business models"
- review of our Open Forum, held in February - a discussion themed around "Reaching out to customers directly: improving the way you market your content"
- news of the latest publishers to join the IngentaConnect service
Labels: "information industry", "institutional identifier", "institutional registry"
posted by Charlie Rapple at 9:21 am
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