DOI News
18 March 2002
At the ONIX International Steering Committee meeting at the London Book Fair
on March 18, EDItEUR and the International DOI Foundation (IDF) announced
their intention to ensure that users of ONIX and DOI will be able to easily achieve
interoperability.
EDItEUR is committed to managing ONIX in such a way that any DOI Registration
Agencies who choose to use it will get the support they need, and the user
community can be assured that different applications of ONIX and DOIs will be
consistent wherever they overlap. The International DOI Foundation is
committed to ensuring that ONIX specifications can be easily used in developing
DOI Applications.
The ONIX (Online Information Exchange) metadata specification
(
www.editeur.org) is the international standard for representing and book, serial
and video product information in electronic form. One of the key aims of ONIX is
to provide a format for delivering structured data, and to that end ONIX has a
much more highly structured model for information than other descriptive
metadata formats, such as Dublin Core.
The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a system for managing digital content, based
on resolution of persistent identifiers together with a well-defined model for
metadata which enables users to map structured data such as ONIX into a DOI
Application, for a wide range of applications. Many initial DOI applications are in
the text sector, and therefore are based on ONIX or on other standards, which
are mapped to ONIX.
DOI is an implementation of the indecs metadata framework, which was also a
guiding principle of the ONIX development. This framework emphasises the
importance of well-formed structured metadata, and provides the key to enabling
ONIX and DOI to work together. The indecs (interoperability of data in e-commerce systems project)
project was established at the end of 1998 and
developed the <indecs> metadata framework, a reference model. At the end of
the project rights in the Indecs Analysis were assigned jointly to the International
DOI Foundation (developing the DOI) and EDItEUR (developing ONIX), who are
actively ensuring its further development in projects such as MPEG which has
adopted indecs as the basis for its Rights Data Dictionary.
ONIX and IDF have announced further work in support of this commitment:
- IDF is currently refining procedures for defining DOI Application Profiles to
add value for users. The aim of the initial work (to be carried out in the
first quarter of 2002) is to develop a template which will help provide
interoperability between DOI Application Profiles, with the minimum
disruption or effort for existing users of ONIX and other systems. This
work is based on recent progress in developing the indecs data dictionary.
Any DOI Applications, which intend to use ONIX, will be part of the
development process. This will include a review of the ONIX and other
DOI metadata sets such as that used by CrossRef to ensure a high level of
compatibility, and commentary on each field in the proposed template to
contribute to a detailed appendix in the DOI Handbook.
- EDItEUR will work closely with IDF on use of ONIX to generate DOI
metadata sets as XML expressions. The current ONIX release goes only
part of the way to enabling the description of some things that may have
DOIs applied, such as content items (though the architecture is there to
handle them): ONIX will therefore encourage anyone who wishes to do
this to contact, and work with, IDF and the EDItEUR ONIX Support Team.
In addition to this work, indecs consultants will review in detail IDF metadata
documentation, and the DOI Data Model, which relates to service definition and
how this relates to ONIX applications. IDF and ONIX are also committed to
working with other metadata standards to create similar mappings.
It is expected that significant progress will be made over the next few months
with including all elements identified in the work above into future ONIX releases
and into the <indecs> data dictionary used by DOI as part of the separately
funded <indecs>2rdd project, in which IDF is participating.
For further information on DOI, see the recently released Edition 2 of the
DOI
Handbook.
The DOI is a system for interoperably identifying and exchanging
intellectual property in the digital environment. A DOI assigned to content enhances a content producer's ability to trade electronically. It provides a framework for managing content in any form at any level of granularity, for linking customers with content suppliers, for facilitating electronic commerce, and enabling automated copyright management for all types of media. The International DOI Foundation, a non-profit organization, manages development, policy and licensing of the DOI to registration agencies and technology providers and advises on usage and development of related services and technologies. The DOI system uses open standards with a standard syntax (ANSI/NISO Z39.84) and is currently used by leading international technology and content organizations.
This is a service announcement for the International Digital Object
Identifier Foundation and has been prepared to increase your awareness about important developments to enable digital copyright management of intellectual property. For more information, please send your request to contact@doi.org.
Updated 23 December 2003
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