Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Illustration by  Pat Hochstenbach The DOI URI Scheme: Utility or Branding? Herbert Van de Sompel 2024-11-13 A few days ago, Joe Wass published a blog post entitled " Falsehoods Programmers believe about DOIs ." It’s an excellent resource for developers that work with DOIs and a sobering read for those that attribute magical powers to DOIs. For about 10 years, Joe was a developer at Crossref , the major DOI registration agency for scholarly communication, so chances are high that he knows what he’s writing about. One of the highlighted falsehoods pertains to the challenges involved when bots attempt to resolve DOIs, following their nose from https://doi.org/ the-doi-name to eventually arrive at a landing page describing the scholarly artifact that has the-doi-name as its persistent identifier. Joe had previously described this bot Odyssey in detail in a Crossref blog post " URLs and DOIs: a complicated relationship " and now adds that “ the landscape has only got ...

Extending our previous discussion about how the proposed rel="identifier" is different from rel="canonical" (spoiler alert: "canonical" is only for pages with duplicative text ), here I summarize various discussions about why we can't use rel="bookmark" for the proposed scenarios .  We've already given a brief review of why rel="bookmark" won't work (spoiler alert: it is explicitly prohibited for HTML <link> elements or HTTP Link: headers) but here we more deeply explore the likely original semantics.  I say "likely original semantics" because: the short phrases in the IANA link relations registry ("Gives a permanent link to use for bookmarking purposes") and the HTML5 specification ("Gives the permalink for the nearest ancestor section") are not especially clear, nor is the example in the HTML5 specification.  rel="bookmark" exists to address a problem, anonymous co...

The rel="identifier" draft has been submitted to the IETF.  Some of the feedback we've received via Twitter and email are variations of 'why don't you use rel="canonical" to link to the DOI?'  We discussed this in our original blog post about rel="identifier" , but in fairness that post discussed a great deal of things and through updates and comments it has become quite lengthy.  The short answer is that rel="canonical" handles cases where there are two or more URIs for a single resource (AKA " URI aliases "), whereas  rel="identifier" specifies relationships between multiple resources. Having two or more URIs for the same resource is also known as " DUST: different URLs, similar text ".  This is common place with SEO and catalogs (see the 2009 Google blog post and help center article about rel="canonical").  RFC 6596 gives abstract examples, but below we will examine real world e...