Jon Udell’s recent post about DOIs and the work of Tony Hammond (who I know from his time at Elsevier Science, my employer’s parent company) reminded me that I’d been postponing a plug for OpenURL. Instead of pointing directly at a resource, an OpenURL carries metadata that gets resolved by a “linking server” to point at one or another copy of the referenced resource. For now, this is usually in an academic context—if you’re studying at a particular university and reading a scholarly paper that references another one, your university’s linking server redirects you to a local copy of the referenced paper.

Along with the Los Alamos page that I link to above, Eamonn Neylon’s post to the OASIS XRI list titled OpenURL in bullets is also a great introduction to OpenURLs. (Is there something about metadata work that particularly appeals to the British? Among my personal and online friends in the markup world, this does seem to be a pattern.) Also check out Tim Bray’s concerns about OpenURL and Tony Hammond’s response to Tim.

As Tony wrote in another href='http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Aug/0079.html'>www-tag
posting, “OpenURLs challenge the notion of authority-specific URI
structures by providing public vehicles for the exchange of
metadata.” DOIs fit into this system very well. According to this short introduction on the relationship of OpenURLs and DOIs, “The OpenURL Framework includes DOI as one of its registered Namespaces and DOIs are widely used in OpenURL implementations.”

And finally, any research into OpenURL will lead you to the work of Herbert Van de Sompel, the digital library science researcher who developed OpenURL with Tony. His PowerPoint presentation The OpenURL Framework: Origins, Evolution, Concepts is another great introduction, and an interview with him by the Online Computer Library Center gives some interesting background on his metadata and linking work.