DOI

[Clive Page]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Andreas Wicenec wrote:

> is anybody aware of the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs,
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june03/paskin/06paskin.html and
> http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/toc.html)? Has it been discussed
> already and I just missed it?

Thanks, Andreas, for providing those URLs - I'd seen them without
realising what they were.  It looks (after a quick browse of the handbook)
like a good system for documents of permanent value.  It _might_ be useful
for astronomical resources of permanent value (raw datasets, images,
source catalogues, etc) but one aspect is of obvious concern: the cost.

As far as I can see a Registration Agency has to pay membership and
issuing fee of $55,000/year which covers the issuing of up to 10 million
DOIs; there's also a maintenance fee which starts at $0.01 per DOI/year
for all DOIs previously issued, easier to think of as $10,000 per million
DOIs.

Quite a number of astronomical data centres now contain terabytes of data,
with typical file sizes (I'd guess) of a few to a few tens of megabytes,
implying numbers of objects to which a DOI *could* be applied around 10^5
to 10^7.  I guess a registration agency (RA) could be some high-level body
like NASA, NSF, PPARC, ESO, or ESA, which might not have problems with
fees of this size.  But the same body has to guarantee the uniqueness of
each DOI, and provide some mimimal metadata (what they call kernel
metadata, see http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/metadata.html#4.3.1 ).
This would be easier to organise, I should think, if each data centre were
an RA;  after all bodies like PPARC have many good points but kernel
metadata handling is not something they are famous for.  But having each
data centre as its own RA would be awfully expensive.

As Tony pointed out, however, the DOI is something that we could adopt
later using existing astronomical identifiers.  In the mean time we would
do well to make sure our identifiers remain compatible, e.g. we don't use
angle brackets in unsuitable places.

Regards


-- 
Clive Page
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester,    Tel +44 116 252 3551
Leicester, LE1 7RH,  U.K.   Fax +44 116 252 3311