| technical foundations

ORCID Executive Update (Sept 11)

ORCID in a nutshell (current strategy):

ORCID is a registry of profiles for people involved in research – a profile can be created by the person themselves (self-registry) or by what is termed a Trusted Partner, such as a University or Publisher.
The people using the system decide who is and is not a researcher, not the system itself.
A self-registered profile, for “John Smith” for example, can state that it is the same ‘John Smith’ in a profile created by a Trusted Partner and vice-versa.

ORCID – a taster of the API

As the official draft API (googledoc) is both in flux and read-protected so that only those invited can see it, I am unable to give you a complete view of how things are shaping up.

However, I can relay a number of key points that everyone involved is concerned about:

ORCID: some questions and answers

The following is from an email exchange with Nicky Ferguson. These are my answers to the questions
he posed, and as such shouldn’t be considered the opinion of the ORCID project itself. They are the
answers I believe are correct, based on the meetings and discussions I have been part of on the
technical advisory group.

If any other member of the advisory group can correct any inaccuracies in the comments, I’d be
most appreciative.

ORCID update – ResearcherID system and a call for API

A quick update:

“The path to academic personal identifiers…

… is littered with the wrecks and remains of many failed projects.”

Researcher ID Task and Finish Group

The first meeting of the Researcher Identifiers Task and Finish Group was highly successful and productive because it kept a tight focus on developing an achievable, clearly articulated body of work and developing a process and timescale for the series of meetings that will inform this process and the commissioning and delivery of the reports that the discussions will continue to inform, round until January 2012.

Practical metadata solutions using application profiles

Until now, a number of application profiles have been developed by various metadata experts, with the support of the JISC, with the intention of addressing the needs of practitioners and service providers (and thus ultimately their users) across the higher education sector in the UK. The most significant of these have been aimed at particular resource types that have an impact across the sector.

What is ePub (and why does it matter for metadata and application profiles)?

ePub is a standard packaging format designed for ebook readers. Why is ePub of interest from the point of view of metadata and application profiles?

JiscEXPO Emerging Themes

In the previous post I gave an overview of the JiscEXPO project outputs available so far, and hinted at ones coming soon. In this post I focus more on the themes and issues that are starting to appear. It can be quite difficult to distill these out of the information available, but I have been able to see a few patterns emerging, even though it is still relatively early days.

JiscEXPO Quarterly Executive Newsletter

A key aim of this JISC programme newsletter is to highlight some of the outputs and emerging themes from across the ten projects that make up the ‘JiscEXPO‘ programme funded by the 2/10 grant funding call, and, if possible, use these to identify any themes that cut across other ongoing JISC programmes.

Dr. Radut