What do we want? Persistent identifiers! When do we want them? NOW!!

[bungo]

I find myself suddenly in the position of trying to understand the persistent identifier meme for our data centre. This is a perilous environment. DOI ("de-oh-eye"? "doiy"?) and their ilk are ostensibly about the more-perfect implementation of the scientific method - supporting reproducible research and acknowledging sources - but really seem to be

Comments

[alexwinolj]

This is a subject I'm quite interested in at the moment!

I don't seem to have a record of your email address. If you'd like to drop me a line care of the contact form on my web site, we can talk more about this.

[finella_c]

This is more of a reflection than a useful suggestion.

I used to be connected to the educational metadata community in the UK. It seemed to me, at the time, that metadata was trying to solve some of the same problems as persistent identifiers, a different way (discoverability, attribution, ownership...).

Then social media grew like topsy and suddenly user tagging instead of formal vocabularies was the way to go. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative page now lists its last update as 2011...

I sometimes wonder whether the DOI thing will go the same way. The semantic web approach seems designed to produce the web as a dynamic interactive environment where iterations of data are re-built on call (Perl/RDF etc.), rather than a static resource set that is retrieved.