NISO-Sponsored INFO URI Scheme

Working under the auspices of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a joint task force of the publishing and library communities has developed and published a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme aimed at the identification of information assets. Information assets should be interpreted rather broadly to include, for example, documents and terms from classification schemes. The INFO URI scheme is a consistent and reliable way to represent and reference such standard identifiers as Dewey Decimal Classifications on the Web so that these identifiers can be "read" and understood by Web applications. Led by four NISO members and associates "Los Alamos National Laboratory, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), Elsevier, and Manifest Solutions" the initiative builds on earlier consultations with representatives from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An Internet-Draft for the INFO URI scheme was first published Sept. 25th, 2003 and a revision published Dec. 5th, 2003

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-vandesompel-info-uri-01.txt

Herbert Van de Sompel, Digital Library Research & Prototyping at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Research Library, stated, "A good example of the problem that the INFO URI scheme solves involves PubMed identifiers: unique numbers assigned to records in the PubMed database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine. PubMed identifiers originated prior to the Web, so they are not URIs. As such they do not exist naturally in the Web infrastructure because the Web only recognizes URIs as a means to identify information resources. So Web applications cannot use PubMed identifiers, and hence cannot reference PubMed records that are identified by them. The solution is to turn PubMed identifiers into URIs. The INFO Registry enables the registration of public namespaces of standard identifiers; NCBI registered its PubMed identifier namespace under the INFO Registry"their namespace is pmid"so we can now talk about the record with the PubMed identifier "12376099" in URI terms as "info:pmid/12376099."

The INFO Registry is now available online at http://info-uri.info/ for receiving new registrations. This Registry contains all the information needed by Web applications to make use of INFO namespaces. Each Registry entry defines the namespace, the syntax, and normalization rules for the representing INFO identifiers as URIs, and gives full contact information for the namespace authority for that entry. Moreover, the INFO Registry is readable by both humans and machines alike.

Posted by Tom on January 20, 2004