Glossary¶

bibliographic item¶

Describes an information resource for bibliography purposes (referencing or citing).

Corresponds to BibliographicItem instance.

citation¶

Sometimes not quite correctly used as a synonym for bibliographic item.

resource identifier¶

document identifier¶

docid¶

Identifier of a resource (a document, a registry, or otherwise).

A resource can have multiple identifiers (e.g., a DOI, an ISBN, etc.), and sometimes a single identifier can be shared by multiple resources (however, such an ambiguous identifier should not be primary, that would be a data integrity issue).

Identifiers are listed under BibliographicItem.docid, and each identifier is a relaton.models.bibdata.DocID instance in Python.

primary resource identifier¶

primary document identifier¶

Main characteristics of a primary identifier:

Identifier value (in Python, the id attribute) can be used to unambiguously reference the document (resource).
A primary identifier is expected to be universally unique to this resource.

Primary identifier uses format more or less similar to NIST’s PubID (possibly the only strongly standardized identifier format). It always starts with a prefix that denotes schema/document family.

In Python, such identifiers have their primary attribute set to True.

resource identifier type¶

document identifier type¶

docid.type¶

The type component of document identifier, contained in docid[*].type field of bibliographic item’s Relaton representation (field type in Python).

Document identifier type in Relaton is a somewhat murky concept. In case of a primary document identifier, its type tends to be used to reference a namespace or registry (e.g., DOI, ISBN), and in other cases used to reference a publishing organization (e.g., IETF, IANA).

Examples: IETF, IEEE, DOI.

docid.id¶

A string that is used to identify a resource within the domain (schema, namespace, etc.) designated by docid.type.

Contained in relaton.models.bibdata.DocID.id.