Signposting Patterns
Prepared by: Herbert Van de Sompel, Martin Klein, Shawn Jones, Michael L. Nelson, Simeon Warner
Originally created 201611, revised 202401
Please provide feedback in the GitHub Signposting repository, using label SignpostingPatterns
Landing pages support humans that interact with scholarly objects on the web, providing descriptive metadata and links to content. But those pages are not optimized for use by machine agents that navigate the scholarly web. For example, how can a robot determine which links on a landing page lead to content and which to metadata? And, how can a bot distinguish those links from the myriad of other links on the page? The Signposting Patterns caters to machine agents by providing this information, and more, in a standards-based way, using Typed Links as a means to clarify patterns that occur repeatedly in scholarly repositories. As an administrator of repositories that host research outputs (e.g. data repositories, institutional repositories, publisher platforms, etc.), you can help machines to navigate the information systems you manage by implementing some of the Signposting Patterns listed on this site. Or, even better, by implementing the FAIR Signposting Profile that provides concrete recipes aimed at uniformity across systems.
Image courtesy of Patrick Hochstenbach.
The Signposting Patterns
Descriptions and examples for the various Signposting patterns are available:
- Author: Use the
authorlink relation type to point from the landing page of a scholarly object to identifiers (e.g. ORCID) of the object's authors. - Identifier: Use the
cite-aslink relation type to point from the landing page of a scholarly object to its persistent identifier, that is, the persistent URI (e.g. HTTP DOI) that redirects to the landing page. - License: Use the
licenselink relation type to point from the landing page of a scholarly object to identifiers (e.g. SPDX URI) of licenses that apply to the object. - Type: Use the
typelink relation type to point from the landing page of a scholarly object to URIs of controlled vocabularies (e.g. schema.org) that denote the object's type, e.g. article, datasets, ... - Content Resources: Use the
itemlink relation type to point from the landing page of a scholarly object to URIs where the object's actual content is available. - Metadata Resources: Use the
describedbylink relation type to point from the landing page of a scholarly object to URIs where metadata describing the object is available.
The Signposting Patterns: An Example
Typed links, as used in Signposting, can be provided in
HTTP Link headers,
HTML link elements, and Link Sets.
This example, as well as the examples in the entire Patterns section, uses the HTTP Link header approach:
Herbert Van de Sompel and Michael L. Nelson are the authors of the paper with DOI
https://doi.org/10.1045/november2015-vandesompel;
their respective ORCIDs are https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0715-6126
and https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3749-8116. The DOI redirects to the environment managed by the publisher of the paper,
specifically to https://www.dlib.org/dlib/november15/vandesompel/11vandesompel.html.
The publisher can express authorship information in a machine-friendly way by providing author links
in a Link header provided in the response to an HTTP HEAD/GET issued against that URL.
The publisher can additionally convey the persistent identifier of the paper by using a
cite-as link. These links allow a bot to follow their nose to find pertinent additional information pertaining to the paper:
Date: Fri, 19 May 2023 06:47:47 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
Last-Modified: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 14:50:19 GMT
ETag: "205a5e-f5ef-524e5e0ab80c0"
Link: <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0715-6126> ; rel="author",
<https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3749-8116> ; rel="author",
<https://doi.org/10.1045/november2015-vandesompel> ; rel="cite-as"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 62959
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8