Just to clarify, encoding identifiers as URI's, my suggestion, is NOT 
"externalizing the information under another URL".   It is just picking 
a standard format for identifiers, the identifier format of the web, to 
re-use standards and cut down on custom vocabulary. If your 'simplebib' 
idea made sense, it could look like:

'simplebib' : {
    identifier:  info:isbn:1234556X
}

or identifier: info:oclcnum:whatever
etc.

Note that "info" URIs not only don't need to be "looked up from another 
URL" to "resolve" -- info URIs are actually un-resolvable!   While the 
ASIN http URI is (sort of) resolvable, it still doesn't _need_ to be 
looked up to resolve. Nothing is externalized.

'simplebib' : {
   identifier:  http://amazon.com/asin/whatever
or whatever.

Likewise for "OpenURL".  Despite the name, OpenURL is, in practice, a 
standard vocabulary/encoding for citation details, it is not a method of 
'externalizing the information'.    This is an OpenURL context object in 
KEV format that identifies a particular book:

rft.title=Manufacturing Consent&rft.au=Noam 
Chomsky&rft_id=info:isbn:whatever

Etc.


If you want to make up your own brand new citation format, then of 
course that is within your capabilities.  It seems to me that trying to 
re-use as much infrastructure that already exists is good.  Even if 
that's just re-using URI infrastructure (including info: URIs).  
Especially if you expect anyone other than you to 'adopt' this.

Jonathan

Tim Spalding wrote:
> Unless someone can come up with a perfect pre-cooked format—one that
> not only covers what we need but is also super easy and
> space-efficient (we have only 1/2k to use!)—Why don't we just decide
> on:
>
> 'simplebib' : {
>
> }
>
> and start filling in fields. I don't think it makes sense to
> externalize the information under another URL, at least in the first
> instance. That at least doubles the calls involved, and makes whatever
> you build dependent on lots of external services that may or may not
> work.
>
> Best,
> Tim
>
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   
>> So almost all of those identifiers can be formatted as a URI.   Although
>> sometimes it takes an info: uri, which some people don't like, but I like,
>> for reasons relevant to their usefulness here.
>>
>> ISBN, ISSN, LCCN, and OCLCnum all have registered info: URI sub-schemes.  I
>> once tried to figure out how to express an EAN as a URI, and I think I _did_
>> eventually find _something_, but it was kind of confusing and hard to track
>> down (The EAN/UPC/etc people have some info URI subschemes registered too, I
>> think, but it's hard to figure out what it all means).  For ASIN, I have
>> been in the habit of using an Amazon http URI, the problem is that Amazon
>> really offers several http URIs for the same ASIN, so you kind of just have
>> to pick one format.
>>
>> Oh, and you can do DOI as an info: URI too.
>>
>> So your annotation _could_ simply be "a URI".  And get a lot of stuff. But
>> this leaves out a lot of things that don't really have good identifiers at
>> all:   Articles in popular (not scholarly) newspapers/journals;   most daily
>> newspapers as titles themselves (don't usually have an ISSN);  Movies;
>>  books too old (or for other odd reasons lacking) an ISBN (or lccn or
>> oclcnum).  Scholarly articles that don't have a DOI (the majority of them).
>>
>> Maybe you could use the citation microformat extended to take arbitrary URI
>> identifiers?  So for stuff without an identifier, you've got the citation
>> details, but you can still stick identifiers in with URIs?
>>
>> And as someone else mentioned, this _is_ pretty much the use-case of
>> traditional "OpenURL", and it does handle it well enough: allowing you put
>> enough structured citation in to identify the referent for things without
>> identifiers, allowing you to put arbitrary URIs  in rft_id.   But OpenURL is
>> kind of a monster to work with.   And doesn't deal too well with certain
>> kinds of citations like movies or music either, it's really focused on
>> published textual materials.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>> Tim Spalding wrote:
>>     
>>> I was wondering if there was a good microformat. The trick is that the
>>> citation format is very much about stuff that gets displayed, and
>>> lacks the critical linking ids you'd want—ISBN, SSN, LCCN, OCLC, ASIN,
>>> EAN, etc.
>>>
>>> If people know of others that would work, maybe that's the answer.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Karen Coombs <[log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Have you looked the the citation microformat (
>>>> http://microformats.org/wiki/citation) ? Don't know where work with this
>>>> stands but it seems pretty interesting to me.
>>>>
>>>> Karen
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>       
>
>
>
>