On Oct 30, 2005, at 11:02 PM, pt wrote:
I wrote a few days ago about using URLs of some kind of as in-text
citation tokens for drafting documents. Easy enough to write about,
but implementation poses some major challenges. I tried working
through what the workflow would be like if I linked to a paper from
someone's Institutional Repository - what then? Would I be able to
find the bibliographic data for that item. So far the results have not
been encouraging.
Which leads me to OpenURL - what's the feeling about how relevant it
might be to bibliographic software for OpenOffice.org?
Peter, I'm no expert on OpenURL, having only ever looked at it briefly.
I'm cc-ing Dan Chudbov, though, who knows a lot more.
My take is this:
OpenURL is trying to solve a different (if related) problem than what
we're concerned with in citations. OpenURL primarily allows one to find
specific items. So, given journal article metadata in a specific form,
OpenURL resolvers will find you physical and/or electronic copies you
have access to.
Our needs are slightly different (or least broader). We need to be able
to unambiguously associate in-text content to its source, whose
metadata we use to precisely format the bibliographic entry to allow a
reader to achieve something like OpenURL: find a copy.
But linking to metadata rich enough to format those references is
essential for us. And we need a solution more general than for
contemporary journal articles, given we may have users who are medieval
historians.
I've been talking to some RDF experts from Nature, Ingenta, etc. about
various issues, including this business of identifying citations, and
it seems to me that discussion is leaning towards a solution where
records per se are not identified (in RDF language, they become "blank
nodes"), but that they may contain various identifiers that can be used
for association. So perhaps a journal article might contain both a DOI
and an OpenURL (?). A citation in the document would then contain a
single identifier (indeed, the proposal accepted last year only allows
one) that would allow the citation processor to find the right metadata
item.
Bruce
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