Linking research & learning technologies through standards

We have posted about the fluidity of researcher identity, and approaches to identity which acknowledge that fluidity—the NicNames project’s in particular. That post discussed the profusion of identities authors now have online, and presumed that those identities need to be deduplicated, and gathered together so that all the author’s work can be aligned to the one identity—even if we do not presume a notion of primary identity.

But the researcher does not always want their disparate identities tethered together. The pseudonym has long been a literary convention, dissected by literary historians (and authority files). Now it is a mainstay of the blogosphere, where a far amount of scholarly writing takes place; and people are well-attuned to the distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous writing. Internet sleuthing can work out the connections between online identities, just as literary scholars have been doing. That doesn’t mean the authors appreciate if you do. There may be an objective reality about an author’s identity, beyond the fluid consensus of authorities. But fluidity may suit the author just fine, because authors want control over their own identity.

We have mentioned NicNames as an approach to dealing with multiple author identities. The other initiative to mention is an outcome of the UKOLN/DRIVER workshop on international repository infrastructure, held in March. One of the infrastructure tasks the workshop faced was how to establish interoperability between repository identifiers internationally, whether they be identifiers for repository objects, or for authors. At a basic level, repository identifiers from the various available schemes—URL, Handle, PURL, XRI—are already interoperable, since all of them are usable under HTTP. But interoperability is a real problem when it comes to what representations the identifiers resolve to, or how to get a service to operate on identifiers from a huge number of different schemes.

Outside their associated services, though, identifiers are just names associated with things, and the workshop came up with a simple solution to identifier interoperability—which ANDS will take the lead in implementing, as presented at the OAI6 workshop in June. The solution is, have authorities assert that two identifiers are pointing to the same thing. This will allow you to translate queries involving one to queries involving the other, without having to build an extra service layer on top of the existing identifier services.

For author identifiers in particular, the identifiers will be the different tokens associated with researchers by sundry identifier authorities—Elsevier and Thomson, national libraries, grants agencies, institutions. And the authorities asserting equivalence between the identifiers will be national hubs (the UN doesn’t yet have the requisite infrastructure). The assertions themselves can be simple RDF statements of equivalence: katherine.mansfield@hogwarths.edu.au owl:sameAs kbeauchamp@unseen.ac.uk .

So the existing identifiers for authors are left alone, there is no unrealistic proposal to substitute them all with a Single Author Identifier. A layer is imposed over these identifiers, to deduplicate them. And that layer is decentralised, to the national level; because that is rather more feasible than a global solution.

A crucial insight is, these national hubs are still accountable to the researchers, unlike the authority file approach. And they will allow researchers to dissociate online identities, if that’s what they want. So if Kath Mansfield does not want the publications of Kate Jackson associated with her, she can get her national hub to assert instead katherine.mansfield@hogwarths.edu.au owl:differentFrom kbeauchamp@unseen.ac.uk. She can do that if the internet sleuthing associating the two identities is wrong. She can also do it, if it turns out to be right: the researcher is still empowered to control the representation of their own online identity.

To some extent. The national hubs are authorities, in the plural, and there may be another national hub insisting they are the same person after all. And that brings us back to consensus-driven wikiality, as we alluded to in the preceding post. There are authorities to assert two identities are the same, and those authorities are necessary to the scholarly process. But the identities of authors are subject to review and revision—just like the research they publish.

Even if *they* know who they are.