University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

The manuscript for *Briefings in Bioinformatics* that I alluded to
[earlier](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2008/03/pagerank-for-biodiversity.html)
has been accepted for publication. I\'ve put a preprint up at Nature
Preceding
([hdl:10101/npre.2008.1760.1](http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.1760.1)).
The final version will appear in print later this year.


The manuscript for
<i>
 Briefings in Bioinformatics
</i>
that I alluded to earlier has been accepted for publication. I've put a preprint up at Nature Preceding (hdl:10101/npre.2008.1760.1). The final version will appear in print later this year.

Biodiversity informatics: the challenge of linking data and the role of shared identifiers

Following on from the discussion of [BHL and
DOIs](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/10/bhl-and-dois.html), I stumbled
across some remarkable work by Robert Cameron at SFU. Cameron has
developed Universal Serial Item Names (USIN). The approach is spelled
out in detail in [Towards Universal Serial Item
Names](http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-12/10) (also on
[Scribd](http://www.scribd.com/doc/432360/Toward-Universal-Serial-Item-Names)).
This lengthy document deals with how to develop user-friendly
identifiers for journal articles, books, and other documents. The
solution looks less baroque than SICIs, which I\'ve [discussed
earlier](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/06/making-taxonomic-literature-online.html).  
  
There is also a web site ([USIN.org](http://usin.org)), complete with
examples and source code. Identifiers for books are straightforward, for
instance
[bibp:ISBN/0-86542-889-1](http://usin.org/bibp1.0/resolve?usin=ISBN/0-86542-889-1)
identifies a certain book:  

  
For journals things are slightly more complicated. However, Cameron
simplified things a little in his subsequent paper [Scholar-Friendly DOI
Suffixes with JACC: Journal Article Citation
Convention](ftp://fas.sfu.ca/pub/cs/TR/1998/CMPT1998-08.html) (also on
[Scribd](http://www.scribd.com/doc/432354/ScholarFriendly-DOI-Suffixes-with-JACC-Journal-Article-Citation-Convention)).  

> JACC (Journal Article Citation Convention) is proposed as an
> alternative to SICI (Serial Item and Contribution Identifier) as a
> convention for specifying journal articles in DOI (Digital Object
> Identifier) suffixes. JACC is intended to provide a very simple tool
> for scholars to easily create Web links to DOIs and to also support
> interoperability between legacy article citation systems and DOI-based
> services. The simplicity of JACC in comparison to SICI should be a
> boon both to the scholar and to the implementor of DOI responders.

  
USIN and JACC use the minimal number of elements in order to identifier
an article, such as journal code (e.g., ISSN or an accepted acronym),
volume number, and starting page. Using ISSNs ensures globally unique
identifiers for journals, but the scheme can also use acronyms, hence
those journals that lack ISSNs could be catered for. The scheme is
simple, and in many cases will provide the bare minimum of information
necessary to locate an item via an OpenURL resolver. Indeed, one simple
way to implement USIN identifiers would be to have a service that takes
URIs of the form :@ and resolves them behind the scenes using OpenURL.
Hence we get simple identifiers that are resolvable, without the baroque
approach of SICIs.  
  
When I get the chance I may add support for something like this to
[bioGUID](http://bioguid.info).


Following on from the discussion of BHL and DOIs, I stumbled across some remarkable work by Robert Cameron at SFU. Cameron has developed Universal Serial Item Names (USIN). The approach is spelled out in detail in Towards Universal Serial Item Names (also on Scribd). This lengthy document deals with how to develop user-friendly identifiers for journal articles, books, and other documents.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

Biodiversity informatics: the challenge of linking data and the role of shared identifiers

Universal Serial Item Names