Message-Id: <199404211712.LAA15124@idaknow.acl.lanl.gov>
To: "Jon P. Knight" <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Re urn2urc-00
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 21 Apr 94 09:59:58 BST."
<Pine.3.05.9404210955.B22786-c100000@suna>
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 94 11:12:46 -0600
From: rdaniel@acl.lanl.gov
J.P.Knight wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Apr 1994 rdaniel@acl.lanl.gov wrote:
> > I would like to be able to put the URNs of these annotations into
> > the URC of the original source. This is so that if you find, say, an
> > interesting research paper, you can easily find out about subsequent
> > work in the field. These URNs take space to store, bandwidth to
> > send to remote servers, and computational power to search.
>
> Erm, this seems a bit dangerous to me if you mean that you'd like all
> citations of a particular paper to be included as links in the original
> paper's URC. Firstly this means that there is an ongoing maintanence
> problem whereby URCs must be continually updated to have new links
> added. Who'll do this? The author(s)? The publishers? Citation
> services? National libraries?
In an earlier posting I had speculated that the URI service would
provide a method for the authors/publishers of the annotations to
do it once the URN of their annotation had been registered.
> Secondly, imagine how big the URC for a
> popular paper would get (something like Tanenbaum's Ameoba papers or
> Birral's RPC description would have huge URC due to the number of other
> papers that quote them). Surely I've misunderstood this?
Nope, I think you've got the picture. There are even worse
examples - care to estimate how many things have been written on
the Bible, the Koran, etc? On the other hand, it is *very* useful
to be be able to do these kind of searches.
> Ok, what about this: the URC for a document has a pointer to zero or one
> ``citation'' indexes. The citation index is the thing that is
> updated with links to articles that cite the original document.
> Citation indexes are under the control of a citation service chosen by
> the owner of the URC. Its the job of the citation service to attempt to
> grab all references to the original document. To make this job a bit
> easier, the document URCs should have a ``references'' field that lists
> the other information sources that this document cites. As these
> citations are fixed by the document, the list in the URC should need
> little or no updating (assuming that wildly different versions of the
> same document with different references in them will probably have
> different URNs and URCs).
This is essentially the way things are currently done on paper, where the
Science Citation Index is built by having people scan a set of journals,
note the citations to articles in the supported set of journals, and finding
the number that SCI assigned to those articles. I think it is a *very*
useful service, I hoped we could provide something similar to the world for
free.
However, your approach seems pretty reasonable. The functionality is still
there, and it leaves the URI server as a fairly minimal design. The
citation index services will need to periodically poll the URI servers to
find new URCs that contain references fields, but this capability exists
in the query mechanism of whois++.
The "references" field would reduce SCI's cost of doing business, which might
reduce their fees. (OK, OK, I'm an optimist :-) Alternatively, it makes it
easy for a competitor to start up and offer equivalent capabilities, perhaps
even for free. Maybe I will start the UCI (Universal Citation Index) in my
ample spare time :-)
The "references" field(s) of the URC should be optional - it makes it possible
to build such a service painlessly, but it does take some effort. It should
be as easy as possible to publish something. What we do need is a mechanism for
the authors/publishers of a resource to update its URC. This is needed to add
new URLs anyway, so it is no big thing. I believe that whois++ provides this,
but I will recheck.
I don't know that we really need the "citation index" field, I think that
there will be a few "well-known" services that provide this info.
Thanks for your input on this, Jon. I am modifying my stuff to go with this
model.
Ron