All My Eye

The PT posse will be at the UKSG annual conference next week. We've got a stand (56 - branded as Publishing Technology so look for the squares not the eye!) - halfway between the exhibition hall entrance and the lunch, so we'll be looking out for you as you queue for rations. It would be worth swinging by if you're there, if only to check out the groovy new design in the works for IngentaConnect (no blogger previews, I'm afraid - not yet, anyway).

I will once again be blogging the conference so if you can't be there, be sure to keep an eye on LiveSerials to find out what's happening ... who's happening ... where it's happening ... whether it's happening? (of course it will be!)

And not that I'm blowing trumpets here, but since we're talking of what's happening, then let me quickly note that both Leigh and I are speaking at the conference. Our simultaneous briefing sessions will run on both Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning so there is no excuse for not seeing us both... Leigh will be holding forth on identifiers:

"as far as the web is concerned, if something doesn't have an identifier then it doesn't exist. Well, nearly ... This session will introduce the basic identifier schemes currently in use on the web and in publishing, and the growing need to expand the assignment of identifiers into new areas: for people, places, institutions, and data sets. Starting with a basic technology introduction, this talk will also highlight some potential impacts of assigning identifiers to new kins of 'content', and explore the possibilities for changing scholarly communication and streamlining the publishing business."

While I will be on my KBART tip:

"For publishers, librarians or intermediaries who have never quite understood the methodology or value of OpenURL and link resolvers: this session will provide an entry-level explanation of these core technologies, followed by a report on the progress of a UKSG-sponsored project to improve the data supplied to knowledge bases, which are key to the efficacy of the OpenURL process."

I think that's about it - see you in sunny Torquay!

Labels: identifiers, kbart, publishing technology, uksg

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.

Labels: "institutional identifier", bioGUID, identifiers, RDF

Catch me, Leigh and the rest of PT, at UKSG next wee(k)

bioGUID

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