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Norman Paskin: Norman Paskin is the first Director of the International DOI Foundation, Kidlington, UK
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Received October 1998. [copyright] Parkin 1998
Standard ways exist (or are in development) for managing Internet resources, such as uniform resource locators (URL), names (URN), and metadata (Resource Description Framework, (RDF)). These resource mechanisms provide an infrastructure for managing resource discovery and distribution, but not a sufficient framework in which to manage intellectual content and the rights which accompany that content, such as access rights and copyright. Publishing - in whatever medium - is the distribution of intellectual content and concomitant rights management (e.g. royalty payments to authors and composers) in any medium. Digital publishing (E-commerce of intellectual content) requires content management with a variety of associated services to manage access and other rights. It also requires persistence of unambiguous identifiers (Paskin (b)). Managed Web distribution is only one component of the required architecture - necessary, but not sufficient.
The digital object identifier (DOI) initiative (DOI (a)), launched in October 1997 following a prototyping phase (Rosenblatt), aims to develop a common mechanism to enable intellectual content management to be integrated with Internet technologies. The DOI activity brings together two communities: the digital technology-oriented community, devising digital library architectures and appropriate technical solutions; and the content-oriented community which views "being digital" as one of several possible mechanisms of publishing.
The digital viewpoint
Information can be captured and manipulated digitally: intellectual content can be embodied in coherent collections of bits, or digital objects. The DOI builds on the digital object concept: "a data structure whose principal components are digital material, or data, plus a unique identifier for this material" (Kahn and Wilensky); "not merely a sequence of bits or symbols ... it has a structure that allows it to be identified and its content to be organized and protected ..." (XIWT); "a document-like object", according to the Dublin Core activity (Caplan, 1995); a knowledge object (KNOB) (Kelly). A digital object is a meaningful piece of data (a precise definition is difficult to reach). There has been substantial progress in this community in defining architectures for digital object structures, e.g. digital libraries, repositories, uniform resource identifiers (URI), and improved mechanisms for digital object access, e.g. (Handle) which resolve to multiple data types...