towards a DataLink IVOA Note

[Norman Gray]

Françoise, hello.

On 15 Oct 2011, at 08:02, Francoise Genova wrote:

> It is planned to discuss data citation in the DataCP
> session
> http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpOct2011DCP
> 
> I am really interested to discuss the DOI capabilities to
> fulfil astronomy needs (e.g. sustainability - which requires
> a strong and sustainable orgaisation among other qualities,
> scalability, etc)

Alberto has scheduled me for a quick talk, presuming that Skype holds up.

For what it's worth, I think the issues are the following:

 1. What should astronomy use for literature citation?
 2. What should astronomy use for long-term (online) document citation?
 3. What should astronomy use for data citation?

1. Seems sorted with arXiv IDs and DOIs.

2. PURLs or ARKs I think solve this.  DOIs are also a possibility, but I have a strong preference for things with 'http://' at the front, and http://dx.doi.org doesn't _really_ do it.  I wouldn't, however, go to the stake for it.

3. It really sounds as if DataCite can handle this.  They certainly seem serious about making sure they can, they seem to be the sort of people (national libraries and the like) who can pull off something international, fully scalable and fully sustainable, and it seems that the only real things to sort out there are what the funding model should be, deciding between a couple of possibilities (the issue is how to have a funding model that's fair to people who want to mint 10 DOI/yr and 10^9 DOI/yr).

The DataCite members are at <http://www.datacite.org/members>.  Should the IVOA become an associate member of this?

I'm pretty sure that we -- meaning the IVOA -- don't have to invent anything in this space. Indeed I'd go further: it is necessary that we do not invent anything here.

Enjoy the indian evening.  All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK