On Oct 23, 2014, at 11:19 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

> Hi, the DOI system supports some metadata lookup via HTTP content-negotiation.
> 
> I found this blog post talking about CrossRef's support:
> 
> http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2011/04/content_negotiation_for_crossr.html
> 
> But I know DataCite supports it to some extent too.
> 
> Does anyone know if there's overall registrar-agnostic documentation from DOI for this service?

None that I'm aware of.  We've actually been discussing this issue in a breakout from 'Data Citation Implementors Group', and I think we're currently leaning towards not relying solely on content negotiation, but also using HTTP Link headers or HTML link elements to make it possible to discover the other formats that the metadata may be available.

If you dig into the OAI-ORE documentation, they specifically mention one of the problems of using Content Negotation is that you can't tell exactly what someone's asking for solely based on the Accept header ... do they want a resource map to the content, or just the metadata from the splash / landing page?



> Or, if there's kept-updated documentation from CrossRef and/or DataCite on it?

It looks like the one for CrossRef is :

	http://www.crosscite.org/cn/

... if you go to the documentation for DataCite, it still has 'Beta' in the title:

	"DataCite Content Resolver Beta"
	http://data.datacite.org/static/index.html  
	(note : http://data.datacite.org/ redirects here, which is linked from https://www.datacite.org/services )


> From that blog post, it says rdf+xml, turtle, and atom+xml should all be supported as response formats.
> 
> But atom+xml seems to not be supported -- if I try the very example from that blog post, I just get a 406 "No Acceptable Resource Available".
> 
> I am not sure if this is a bug, or if CrossRef at a later point than that blog post decided not to support atom+xml. Anyone know how I'd find out, or get more information?


The link I gave to CrossRef documentation has three e-mail addresses at the bottom, if you wanted to ask them if the documentation is still current*:

	6 Getting Help
	Please contact [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] for support.


-Joe


* and this is why when I used to maintain documentation, every document had both 'last revised' and 'last reviewed' date on 'em, so you had a clue how likely they were to be out of date.