In today's world, intranet professionals face many challenges in incorporating an abundance of information, both external and internal, into the daily work flow of their constituents. One of the greatest hurdles is enabling a user to easily discover, locate, and access contextually relevant information, especially if that information is provided from a variety of sources. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI), long used by the science, technology, and medical (STM) journal publishing industry for citation-based linking, now is being rapidly adopted by other content companies. The DOI affords a relatively simple, cost-effective yet powerful tool for contextually linking materials within and across intranets.
What is a Digital Object Identifier?
The DOI is an internationally recognized open standard developed to enable any specific piece of content (e.g., news article, video, photo, piece of music, or software routine) to be located and linked to, regardless of physical location. As a linking tool, DOIs supplement URLs in many ways.
DOIs are unique identifiers associated with individual pieces of content, at whatever level of granularity important to the content owner, so that the content can be cross-linked and discovered more easily. One key aspect of the DOI numbering itself is that it does not require changes to any existing internal numbering scheme. By way of a combination of a prefix (where the prefix is provided by a DOI registration agency) and a suffix (any preexisting item number such as an internal document or database record number, an ISBN in the book world), the DOI incorporates all industry and internal schemas. It is this prefix/suffix combination that ensures uniqueness, both internally and throughout the Internet.
Beyond the unique identifier, the DOI has an underlying, fully deployed, commercially operating, scalable routing infrastructure, which is analogous to and yet separate and distinct from the Domain Name System (DNS). This Internet-based infrastructure was developed by Dr. Robert Kahn, one of the principal inventors of the Internet, and is operated by Dr. Kahn's nonprofit research group, CNRI (Corp- oration for National Research Initiatives), which coordinates or supports many Internet standards bodies such as the IETF, IAB, etc. The underlying routing system, called the Handle System, is a public utility like TCP/IP, DNS, or any of the other standards on which the Internet runs. As such, it not only is cost-effective to use, but it also means that through its use organizations will be riding on top of a standard at the communications level, with all the benefits of utilizing a standard—interoperability, mass adoption, etc.
How Are DOIs Unique and Transforming?
As a combined numbering scheme and routing mechanism, DOIs are supplements to URLs for critical and transforming reasons:
DOIs Are Information/Object-Based Links
Where URLs link only to a location, DOIs link to the information object itself, regardless of its current location. Access to information is "future-proofed" against any Web site or intranet redesign, migration of information to other servers either internally or via outsourcing, divestiture of content, or sale of company assets to another company.
DOIs Are Permanent Links
Because URLs point to physical locations, they are by their nature temporary, static and inherently fragile as locations change. Once an object is placed at a server location, the URL and all downstream Web references pointing to that URL (e.g., external search engine or internal search results, user bookmarks, links on other Web sites) are fixed. When the object is moved, any attempted link results in an "Error Message 404, File Not Found." DOI links, on the other hand, by virtue of the underlying technology, are permanent, even as the object location changes.
DOIs Are Persistent Links
DOI links travel throughout the Internet wherever links and content travel, such as via e-mails, PDF files, Word documents, or Excel files. DOIs function not only across the Internet and Web but also within internal, nonpublic, and proprietary systems, enabling and supporting key intranet applications.
DOIs Afford MultiLinks
URLs afford only a single link, but DOIs enable multiple links to be established from a single hyperlink. This MultiLink feature offers the opportunity to contextually interlink any and all related objects, products, and services associated with the item represented by the DOI.
DOIs Afford Dynamic Updating
DOIs are not only permanent, persistent, and multiple-linking, but they also are dynamic—DOI links can be maintained and modified at any time. Indeed, it is this dynamic updating that enables the permanence, persistence, and multilinking features that have such enormous transforming and practical value to content owners and users alike.
DOIs Are Enabled via Automated Link Lookup and Insertion
DOIs are not only permanent, persistent, and multiple-linking, but they also are dynamic—DOI links can be maintained and modified at any time. Indeed, it is this dynamic updating that enables the permanence, persistence, and multilinking features that have such enormous transforming and practical value to content owners and users alike.
DOIs Are Enabled via Automated Link Lookup and Insertion
DOI hyperlinks that direct users to their own or others' related content (e.g., intra- and/or intercontent owner citation linking) are inserted within documents or onto intranets and Web sites much as URLs are inserted today. The process of DOI lookup and insertion can be fully automated and scaled for volume (e.g., to populate an entire database of information objects such as individual articles, internal documents, bibliographies, and footnotes) with external link-outs.
What Does DOI Mean to an Intranet Professional?
Much of the application of DOIs has been focused in the publishing world itself. Those developments will continue. With the rate of DOI adoption rapidly increasing, and with applications and services being developed and supported by DOI registration agencies driving adoption, intranet professionals everywhere soon will begin to see DOIs—both in content received from and within the content on publishers' subscription sites. For example, note recent announcements from McGraw-Hill Education, Thomson Learning's Gale, Business & Legal Reports (BLR), and RAND Corporation that they have begun to affix DOIs to their content.
When a supplier of critical company, product and industry research reports; technical or market consulting reports; competitive intelligence research; directory publishing records; or product catalogs and specifications announces that it has MultiLink DOI-enabled its content, users have far more richly and contextually linked material, enabling easier discovery, access, and navigation within and across the publisher's site. For one such example, see http://books.mc graw-hill.com. Click on any of the subjects listed at the left and mouse over "See the DOI for more info" under each book.
Further, to the extent that publishers interlink among themselves, much as the STM journal world has done, users have that same improved service across and among the various content stores. Naturally, where access is restricted, users who interlink to content for which they have no access will be stopped at the front door. Over time, this would help in assessing the need for providing access to additional content from those publishers. The more immediate and exciting opportunity here is in supplying user access to the same content provided today, although where today it is offered via independent content silos (indeed, often not well interlinked within themselves), tomorrow it will be offered via richly and contextually interlinked products within and across publisher sites.
Content loaded onto the intranet, rather than as a link to the publisher's site, also benefits from DOIs' persistence. The DOI interlinking across that publisher's content will transport seamlessly, with the content itself, to your site, enabling users to experience the same richly and contextually interlinked content as if they were on the publisher's site.
In addition, efforts to link from the intranet out or within/across intranet locations, in bibliographies, to holdings files, etc., will be vastly improved. These links to newly available items in the corporate information center, on the intranet itself, publicly available on the Web via search engines, news and product listing, etc., all can be made knowing the links are permanent and will never break. With this, there is no need to worry about users failing to find the content, and there is no ongoing requirement to manage and maintain link-checking software.
There is an increasing awareness of how publishers can use DOIs for asset management1, and the same applications and capabilities exist for companies to apply DOI technology to their own documents as if they were publishers. Internal publishers would affix DOIs to internal documents of any type or location on the intranet in much the same way as publishers affix them. The basic process uses a document's descriptive metadata, location links, and if required, the same measure of internal access control that exists on the intranet today where linking is undertaken to restricted-access documents. The organization can realize the inherent value of DOI for its own content, whether for internal or external use.
Last, but not least, the richest and most exciting opportunity, once both publishers' content and internal documents have been DOI-enabled, is the internal cross-linking of both via the intranet. Imagine, for example, internal research, product, marketing, legal, strategy, IP, planning, and budget documents contextually linked both with one another and with publishers' documents on the same topic, enabling the internal author to bring them together seamlessly and the reader to interoperate easily across both, all within the intranet.
SIDEBAR: A Brief History of the Digital Object Identifier
In the early to mid-1990s, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade association for U.S.-based book and journal publishers, identified the prospect for electronic publishing as an industrywide opportunity. The APP established a committee to investigate the pro-competitive challenges and how best to interoperate across a substantial supply chain. The committee ultimately characterized both the need for standards and determined that the first standard required was for a unique content identifier.
At the same time, the APP realized that any successful numbering scheme must be flexible in a variety of ways so as to accommodate the diverse, somewhat unique and changing needs of the publishing community. They recognized that the numbering scheme must be unique across the publishing (and Internet) landscape; "dumb" (having no inherent meaning)
At the same time, the APP realized that any successful numbering scheme must be flexible in a variety of ways so as to accommodate the diverse, somewhat unique and changing needs of the publishing community. They recognized that the numbering scheme must be unique across the publishing (and Internet) landscape; "dumb" (having no inherent meaning); nonconforming to restrictions on character style, length, etc.; applicable to all types of content assets; capable of being routed such that it could be both discovered and passed through a directory mechanism in order to accommodate changes to its location and ownership; and finally, driven by a database record held physically independent of the number itself so that changes could be made to the record without consideration of any previous Internet location.
In 1997, subsequent to the AAP's initial efforts, its Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, comprising many STM journal publishers, faced increasing demand on the part of primary library subscribers. These subscribers were in turn representing their own constituents, the researchers who already had been working via the pre-Web Internet.
The rest, as they say, is history. The STM publishers recognized the need and value of what had become known as the DOI. They discovered Dr. Robert Kahn's Handle System, and over the course of the next year or so, via a series of industry conference demonstrations, the leaders of the STM publishing world developed an application using DOI. Each footnote of reference and bibliography listings would be DOI hyperlinked to the location on one another's servers, regardless of its then current location. Currently, more than 200 STM publishers are interoperating at the reference and citation level via nearly 7 million DOIs, much to the benefit of their Internet and intranet subscribers.
Since then, AAP has continued to support the DOI. It now has been adopted as the numbering scheme of choice for e-Books and increasingly is being used across the book publishing industry and a host of other content industries (e.g., research reports, e-learning, and photography). Further, the International DOI Foundation (IDF), has been established as the governing body (akin to ICANN in the domain name space) that oversees DOI governing policy, establishes DOI registration agencies (akin to Network Solutions, Register.com), and otherwise oversees the coordination across the related constituents.
Links to Additional Information:
http://doi.org
http://www.cnri.reston.va.us
http://www.contentdirections.com
Special thanks to David Sidman, Founder & CEO of Content Directions, Inc. (http://www.contentdirections.com), the first commercial DOI Registration Agency, for his contributions
See: "Enterprise Content Integration Using the DOI," by Bill Rosenblatt. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1220/whitepaper5.
Source: "The Digital Object Identifier—An Electronic Publishing Tool for the Entire Information Community." Carol A. Risher and William R. Rosenblatt, Serials Review, vol. 24, no. 3/4, 1998.