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- Illustrate the benefits in “closing the gap” between those with an incentive to maintain identifiers and those whose responsibility it is to do so
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- Illustrate costs and benefits by articulating workflows in specific HEIs, and identifying stakeholders and value in each context
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- Provide a cost assessment of getting a system running using various persistent identifier schemes and infrastructures
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- Illustrate how existing software packages that presuppose particular schemes and policies with regard to persistent identifiers work in practice, identifying the implications of the schemes and policies used and addressing any issues arising out of these
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- Illustrate the pros and cons of specific approaches and identifier schemes and how well these work across different contexts and communities
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- Illustrate best practice usage of existing persistent identifier schemes in various contexts, and where relevant, pay heed to those areas thought to be a source of confusion currently or about which there is a lack of awareness.
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- Specific studies from breakout group discussions:
- The Administrative Information group suggested Southampton Universitys approach to identifying people (amongst other things) be the subject of a study. This uses a system backed by linked data, and uses a co-reference approach to relate a multiplicity of identifiers that represent the same person..
- A case study based on the Research Papers sector may be useful, as this sector deals with a wide variety of curation and preservation responsibilities, many of which lie outside the institution.
Hugh
Thanks for the comments. You’re right, Names is a source of identifiers but the point I was making is that it works with other major sources/potential sources. I did do a fuller reply to your original comment and that appears to have been lost on this thread so I am hoping a moderator will find it and publish it! Anyway, to answer your most recent comment Names is looking at a very specific problem, which is building up a trust fabric for person identifiers for research information. Whilst you’re right that it’s useful to be able to find identifiers on a linked data basis, I think it’s also useful to have trusted sources for these. In that sense, it isn’t doing the same job as something like sameas.org, which is looking at joining up named individuals from as many sources as possible. I’d say there was room for both as long as there is interoperability, and that’s the key.
So, I think I’m agreeing with you and I’d strongly recommend getting in touch with the project to make their identifiers as findable by tools such as sameas.org as possible.
Thanks James.
From the API it looks to me like Names is more about helping people to find identifiers and related data than providing the lookup for identifiers that are not Names IDs.
I have a fundamental problem with the idea of a new authority. It seems clear to me that the problem of having too many identifiers is not solved by creating another one; what is required is a system that provides the mapping/linkage without creating a new ID.
Furthermore, gathering related data into an extra place simply creates an extra maintenance problem for all concerned; the organisations that own that data already publish and maintain it themselves, and therefore it is already accessible on the web, without copying – the point of the web is that data does not need to be copied.
Names looks like it may be a useful directory of data about academics with data from certain sources; but it is unclear to me how it might relate to other sources. If I have a URI for Brian Randell how will it help me discover the other 179 URIs (including dbpedia, etc) that many would consider are also him?
(http://sameas.org/?uri=http://newcastle.rkbexplorer.com/id/person-4)
So the search facilities are really useful, but once a Linked Data URI has been identified, Names seems to be silent (or complex) on how to find other URIs that are equivalent.
I realise that this discussion might well be more part of a conversation about Names; but the reason it is here is because this document has chosen to relegate my recommendation for JISC activity exclusively to a summary of the talk, in an appendix.
In the end, I think Names is aiming to fulfil a different role:- it is about search and discovery and attempting to issue authoritative IDs, whereas the problem I am concerned with is lookup and identification of existing URIs.
By the way, in the Linked Data world, Names seems to relate very strongly to the okkam project and their ENS (http://www.okkam.org/ and http://api.okkam.org/search/), but I can’t find any connections between the two. Do you know if this is happening?
Best
…just to add that in the case of REST, Names is RESTful, with the usual proviso of ‘it depends on your definition of REST’. Further details are in the interface documentation at http://names.mimas.ac.uk/help.html#quickAPIGuide and the project is more than happy to have your feedback so please do get in touch via the project manager listed on the JISC project page.
As far as I can tell (from the JISC site) the Names project (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/reppres/sharedservices/names.aspx) finished on 28 February 2009.
I have also been to http://names.mimas.ac.uk/ and thence http://130.88.120.172/names/, but it looks like it is doing (or did) studies, rather than a product level solution. Certainly none of the names I tried seem to get much useful response, and it does not look like a RESTful service.
In any case, it looks like a central authority, and as I have said, a central authority is not the correct solution to the problem.
Have I missed something?
Hugh, unfortunately the JISC site search and Google are still ‘learning’ the location of the current project so you need to go to http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/shainf/names2.aspx for details of the new project, which can be found in the attached project plan. You’re right that it is currently running in a pilot mode and so has a small sample set of data but bulk updates are planned soon so that users can play with it more; there are further details on that in the project plan. I’d partially agree with you on centrality. Yes, the project aims to be a useful store of academic names for funding bodies and institutions. However, the aim is to make it interoperable and there are already links with ISNI, VIAF and ORCID as well as other national initiatives so it is not looking to be exclusive, which I think is where you are going with your comment. The project is also being developed with key stakeholders such as the research councils and institutional repositories so it is being driven by user need, which I think it is important to bear in mind if we are to have these services be sustainable. Re the REST question, let me ask the developer and post a response here. I thought it would be useful to immediately respond to your comments above as I think most of them have been answered by the project.
The Southampton University system does nothing about co-reference – it is pure Linked Data.
There is another system, RKBExplorer.com, that does do a lot of co-reference. This has been developed as a project at Southampton University, but is not part of the main system.
Bear in mind JISC is currently funding Names, which deals with name identifiers.