DOI® News
December 2007
DOI® News is a public news release. Information contained within
this newsletter may be reproduced and disseminated to all interested parties.
In this issue:
- ISO standard on the DOI System
- IDF Annual Meetings 2008
- Standards to be linked using DOI System
- Latest DOI Tools
The DOI® System is currently being standardised through the International Standards Organisation, ISO, and a working group (ISO TC46/SC9/WG7) has been active on this since September 2006. Recently the ISO Working Group approved a final draft as a Committee Draft (standard for voting) to be processed by ISO through the formal ISO voting process. It is expected that the process will be finalised during 2008.
A significant part of this activity was clarification of the status of other identifier systems and how these can work with the DOI System; the draft standard includes recommendations on how this can be achieved through agreeing incorporation of other schemes into the syntax or metadata of the DOI System, and the International DOI Foundation (IDF) has already concluded agreement regarding appropriate incorporation of some important ISO identifiers (ISBN, ISSN, ISRC) into the DOI System. A pilot application involving use of ISBNs within DOI names is underway.
Paul Jessop, Chief Technology Officer at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a participant in the working group since its inception, commented: "I believe it is critical that anyone wanting to use an identification system that takes a rigorous approach to its metadata should be able to find one in the international standards portfolio. The DOI System builds on the same solid foundation that we helped to create in the indecs project and which we use extensively."
Norman Paskin, Convenor of the Working Group, noted: "the agreement on a final standard draft, responding to comments from a wide variety of national standards bodies, means that the final draft is a substantial improvement on the original proposal submitted in Sept 2006, thanks to the active involvement of the 30+ participants in the working group who have provided critical improvements".
Brian Green, Chair of ISO TC46 SC9, commented: "the process of agreeing a final draft has been a significant one for SC9, which is now dealing with a wide variety of application areas and where the need for common approaches is becoming increasingly apparent". In a related activity, the ISO TC46SC9 Identifier Interoperability Group has agreed to progress the development of a standard vocabulary of relationships between identified entities, foreseen in its earlier discussions, and the IDF welcomes this and intends to offer assistance in realising it.
Following the successful series of meetings held in Washington in mid 2007, the International DOI Foundation will be holding a similar series of meetings in Brussels on June 17th, at the invitation of the Office of Publications of the European Community. An IDF meeting on the theme of persistent identifiers in the library world (especially DOI System and Handle System) will run in conjunction with a wider Handle System Workshop. Internal IDF business meetings will be held the following day.
All meetings will be by invitation, but a wide range of participants are welcomed: if you would like to participate in one or more of these meetings, please register you interest by email to contact@doi.org. Detailed agendas and announcements will be published in early 2008.
At an invitation workshop held on Dec 6 in London, in conjunction with the International OnLine meeting,
BSI British Standards and the DOI Registration Agency
CrossRef stated their intention establish a working group of interested parties, made up of both CrossRef members and outside organizations, to discuss best practice for assigning DOI names to standards. This would enable a number of services to evolve, beginning with the ability to cross-reference standards as easily as can now be done for published research articles, through the DOI-based CrossRef service.
This follows the announcement from CrossRef that BSI has joined as a new CrossRef member. As a member, subject to the creation of an appropriate protocol, BSI will be able to register standards with CrossRef and implement interlinking with other scholarly and scientific publications. This will be achieved through use of the DOI System for which CrossRef provides content registration services. CrossRef includes hundreds of publishers and societies, with 28.9 million content items registered to date. BSI British Standards has 27,000 current standards.
A priority of the International DOI Foundation is to encourage and enable the development of tools to facilitate the use of the DOI
® System and DOI
® names by end users. The list of
DOI System Tools identifies tools that are currently available, with descriptions and links to their sources, and tools that are currently under development: it now comprises fourteen tools, from a variety of sources.
Recent additions include:
-
CNRI Handle System Client Extension for Mozilla. The DOI System is an application of the Handle System. This extension to Firefox embeds a handle client in the browser, allowing the display of several optional formats for the display of handle data, and eliminating the need to rely on a proxy to redirect to a URL. It also performs administrative tasks, such as creating new handles and updating handle values.
- Independently developed ONIX DOI Name Registration Formats. Through its collaboration with mEDRA and Nielsen BookData as DOI Registration Agencies, EDItEUR has developed a collection of DOI registration formats allowing publishers and others to communicate the metadata required by a Registration Agency in order to record the assignment of a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). The formats have also been adopted by OPOCE, the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. The formats allow a DOI name to be assigned at "work" or "manifestation" level to a variety of types of material: whole monographs, chapters or parts of monographs, serials, serial issues, or serial contributions. Other types of material are to be added in due course. The complete collection of formats is covered by a single XML schema, accompanied by separate specifications for each type of material.
The DOI is a system for interoperably identifying and exchanging
intellectual property in the digital environment. A DOI assigned to content enhances a content producer's ability to trade electronically. It provides a framework for managing content in any form at any level of granularity, for linking customers with content suppliers, for facilitating electronic commerce, and enabling automated copyright management for all types of media. The International DOI Foundation, a non-profit organization, manages development, policy and licensing of the DOI to registration agencies and technology providers and advises on usage and development of related services and technologies. The DOI system uses open standards with a standard syntax (ANSI/NISO Z39.84) and is currently used by leading international technology and content organizations.
This is a service announcement for the International Digital Object
Identifier Foundation and has been prepared to inform you of developments to enable digital copyright management of intellectual property. For more information, please send your request to contact@doi.org.
Prepared 12 December 2007
