Walking the dog just now, I was pondering the extent to which linking to a resource via a digital object identifier (DOI) could be regarded as a persistent search.
A normal link - <a href="http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blog">OUseful blog</a> - isn't really a search of course (unless you consider domain name resolution or URL rewriting some sort of search) so why should something like doi:10.1045/april2005-hammond be regarded as search? (The lookup is achieved using the OU LinkfinderPlus resolver.)
Well, the DOI resolver - which maps a DOI onto an electronic resource - makes the link between a persistent DOI and a potentially transitory location for the resource. Now I'm not clear about the actual mapping between a DOI and a resource, but from the way I've seen them (ab)used(?), DOIs seem to act a bit like an ISBN in the sense that a particular journal article, say, may have different DOIs according to which database it is on (cf. different ISBNs for hard and soft cover books); and the same DOI may also point to different archived copies of a particular document (for example, different shelf copies of a book with the same ISBN).
That is, my understanding is that a DOI can have a one-to-many relationship with the different locations a particular article might be retrieved from; and there may also be a many-one-relationship between several DOIs and a particular article.
(If anyone can clarify this for me before I read the specs, comments will be open for a day or two from the OUseful Blog homepage page;-)
Anyway, anyway, what struck me was that if this is indeed the case then the resolver is potentially searching several sources when provided a DOI, with the intention of sending the user to one of them, or returning one of the resource instantiations back to the user.
So for the case of one DOI pointing to many potential retrieval locations, how does the resolver decide which to return?
Isn't there potentially a commercial advantage here for the service location that is preferentially returned?
I need to go and read the specs I think...
Posted by ajh59 at March 25, 2006 07:40 PM