4.1.1.  General

Machines are increasingly used to parse and correlate content given in digital formats, and that applies to document identifiers as well.

Machine-readable, or format restricted document identifiers are immensely useful, for example, the naming of DOI identifiers and encoding within databases.

The perpetual enemy of machine-readability is ambiguity. With the PubID data elements, a machine-readable identifier will provide a machine a “single-step” understanding where individual data elements of the identifier can be parsed and understood with minimal effort.

The last bullet of the last bullet in NIST PubID, Clause 3.1 demonstrates consideration of characters allowed in DOI suffixes, and hints that the PubID scheme complies with the requirements of a DOI suffix, by stating that these characters are allowed: -._,()/.

However, DOIs are to be used within URLs. The standard for URLs, RFC 3986, Clause 2.3 clearly states that only the following characters do not get “percent-encoded”:

This means that these characters: comma ,, open and close parentheses (), should be percent-encoded, and hence causing an unnecessary rewrite of the URL for the user.

4.1.2.  Proposal

Figure 1 shows how the PubID data elements, by providing a machine-readable data structure, enables a stable core for these various output formats to be generated.

We propose extending the functionality of the PubID scheme such that it generates a corresponding, deterministic identifier that is easily machine-parseable for machine consumption, for purposes such as DOI, where it only utilizes the ASCII characters in the set of ALPHA, DIGIT, hyphen and period.

In particular, the machine-readable PubID (“MRID”) utilizes periods instead of spaces as element delimiters.

The proposed scheme, by design, is meant to be very similar to existing assignments of DOI to NIST Tech Pubs.

The scheme is presented in Annex B.5.

4.2.1.  Background

The NIST PubID scheme (NIST PubID) defines a metadata-enhanced document identifier scheme that allows generation of a unique reference using a set of defined data elements.

A traditional NIST Tech Pub practice, especially in CSRC publications, is to provide the following variant forms of document identifiers within the document itself:

• Full form, used in the title and the bibliography for citations

  EXAMPLE 1

  “National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-27, Revision A”

• Abbreviated form, used in the “Authority” section

  EXAMPLE 2

  “Natl. Inst. Stand. Technol. Spec. Publ. 800-57 Part 1, Revision 4”

• Short form, used for inline citations

  EXAMPLE 3

  “In Section 3.2 of SP 800-187…​”

4.2.2.  Proposal

NIST PubID today provides an identifier that can be used as a short form, given the compactness of its syntax.

As the “full form” and “abbreviated form” identifiers already exist within a document, and that the PubID data elements already provide sufficient information to generate such output, we recommend to allow the generation of the “full form” and “abbreviated form” identifiers as well.

This change can be enacted by creating “full form” and “abbreviated form” generation templates — extend every data element to also provide their “full form” and “abbreviated form” representation.

The proposed list of data elements (with alternative form representations) is provided in Annex A.

4.3.1.  Background

The NIST PubID scheme (NIST PubID) defines a metadata-enhanced document identifier scheme that allows generation of a unique reference to a NIST Tech Pub document without ambiguity.

There are at least two major “pattern series” of identifiers before the introduction of PubID due to historical reasons:

• NIST publications produced prior to the PubID scheme (1988-)

• NBS publications, produced under the National Bureau of Standards (the previous name of NIST, 1901 to 1988)

Ribose has implemented the PubID scheme in its Relaton bibliographic software, allowing for the lossless translation of an existing NIST Tech Pub document identifier into (and from) a NIST PubID.

The open-source Relaton web service routinely imports two datasets from NIST in order to facilitate citations for NIST authors, including:

1. the NIST CSRC Metanorma endpoint, which serves CSRC publications;

2. the NIST Library’s Tech Pubs GitHub repository, which serves an export of CrossRef bibliographic data for NIST Tech Pubs, curated by the NIST Library.

4.3.2.  Proposal

Ribose has back-tested the full database of 19,283 NIST Tech Publications with the PubID scheme, including with documents published under NBS, and the scheme applies well given minor tweaks. These publications span the publication years of 1901 to 2021.

We have built up a full list of NIST and NBS Tech Pubs series in Annex A.3, and all of them have shown to work with the PubID scheme.

Adoption of this recommendation requires the creation of a new “publisher” data element (Annex A.2), where it can be “NIST” or “NBS”.

4.4.1.  Background

In NIST PubID the part types supported include “Part”, “Volume”, “Section”, “Supplement” and “Index”.

However, in the NIST Library’s collection of NIST Tech Pubs, there are also the following types of documents:

1. Addendum. “NIST SP 800-38A” has a separately published addendum;

2. Insert. “NBS CIRC 25 insert” is an insert;

3. Errata. “NIST SP 801-errata” is a published errata.

4.4.2.  Recommendation

Support these additional part types with the following encoding:

1. Addendum. “add” followed by potentially a number;

2. Insert. “ins”;

3. Errata. “err”“.

The full list of part types is given in Annex A.6.