Welcome to NicNames
Stuart Hall,
The NicNames Project,
Oct 31, 2008
An idea whose time is long over due. It has never been sufficient to use strings - or even vCards - to identify authors in metadata, and I'm surprised that such methods have survived to this point. Along comes a project to address that. "NicNames can be read as 'Names in Context' and refers to the purpose of the project, which is 'to provide a means to more effectively manage author names in institutional repositories'." There is a project outline in iPaper on the website which maps the territory a bit but which doesn't go deeply into specifics. Here's what it's going to have to be, from my perspective: authors will need to be identified as URLs, where the URL will point to an XML (or some such) document containing contact information and the rest. This unique ID will (eventually, maybe years down the line, depending on how badly corporations mess up OpenID) also be the author's unique OpenID address.
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