Page History

From: "Gudmundur A. Thorisson" <gthorisson@gmail.com>
Date: March 7, 2012 4:02:43 PM EST
To: VIVO Development List <vivo-dev-all@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Vivo-dev-all] DOI vs URI
Reply-To: VIVO Development List <vivo-dev-all@lists.sourceforge.net>

Hi. The DOI system is built upon the Handle identifier resolution infrastructure (http://www.handle.net). There's several "flavours" of DOIs for digital content, created different communities and purposes. The most significant ones are the DOIs issued to the majority of STM publications via CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org) and to increasing numbers of scientific datasets in digital repositories via DataCite (http://data.datacite.org).

DOIs (and also non-DOI Handles) can be treated as URIs by representing them prefixed by URLs which point to central resolver services, usually http://dx.doi.org. For example, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000388 is a unique, resolvable URI identifier for the PLoS article currently located at http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000388

Both CrossRef and DataCite recently launched add-ons to their resolution services to support the use of DOI URIs in Linked Data applications such as VIVO:

Content Negotiation for CrossRef DOIs - http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2011/04/content_negotiation_for_crossr.html
DataCite supporting content negotiation - http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2011/10/datacite_supporting_content_ne.html

See geeky curl-exercise below to get an idea of the kind of stuff you get back from dereferencing one of those URIs.

Mummi

mummi@nfmac07curl http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000388 -L -H "Accept: text/turtle" -I
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Location: http://data.crossref.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000388
Expires: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:23:09 GMT
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 196
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:55:40 GMT

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:55:41 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 3.0.7
Vary: Accept
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Content-Length: 1902
Status: 200
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/turtle;charset=utf-8

mummi@nfmac07curl http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000388 -L -H "Accept: text/turtle" -L
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .

<http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000388>

<http://id.crossref.org/issn/1553-7358>

<http://id.crossref.org/contributor/david-b-searls-1r4443rhanu8>