Good example! - Steve Koch

Steve & all, of what kind of functional citation exactly is this a good example? am I right in seeing the following: the number of items listed in the first link is roughly the same as in the second link (trusting the automatic counter that shows 811257 for the first and 811205 for the second - do we want to just ignore this difference in listed results?) - and they are sorted differently, too - could someone tell me if I am looking at the right pieces of information here? - Claudia Koltzenburg

functional citations – what exactly do we want them to do? http://ff.im/8HPXx - Claudia Koltzenburg

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. One link is to the current result (which in principle can change and even break), while the other is a snapshot of what Cameron saw on september 24. The snapshot is stored by http://www.webcitation.org/ which seems to be a reliable way of preserving a website snapshot "forever." Citing the snapshot is important, so readers will be able to see what you were talking about, even if the website goes away or the information changes dramatically. - Steve Koch

thanks, Steve, hm, let's see: actually, we don't know what Cameron saw on that day, we only know/believe which snapshot was cashed: "2009-09-24 06:09:33" - and also: WebCite® saying in this snapshot "Showing WebCite for URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites...]" to me does not quite match with the need of a functional ciattion, or am I mistaken here? - Claudia Koltzenburg

so, am I right in thinking that if PubMEd had an openly visible version history like, e.g., almost any wiki, there would be no need to fix a certain point in time by exporting it to WebCite®, since we might just refer to the relevant version and its own time stamp (and maybe export to WebCite® for just the same reasons as we would otherwise). Hm, does this actually mean that any export to WebCite® would make the citation a functional citation - or is this overdoing it? :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Well you know that someone cached a specific page and if you believe WebCite you have time and date. The first link is actually a query rather than a static link. Actually interesting that it has changed which means papers for 2008 are still being added. My point was that the first link is a "functional citation" in that it asks a service for a result from an "experiment" with in principle up to date data. The second is a snapshot in case everything breaks. - Cameron Neylon

I'm not sure about the definition of "functional citation." But I think there's great value in WebCite, even if the website has a version history. WebCite stores a cached version, AND there's good reason to believe the link will remain good for a really long time. See the FAQs: http://webcitation.org/faq - Steve Koch

Oh. Duh! I actually didn't get it until now. :) "functional citation" is NOT the webcitation link. Still a good example. But now it's also a really good example of why you'd want to use webcitation.org as well. - Steve Koch

You'd have to be careful about overtaxing services, but could a "functional citation" generate a new WebCite snapshot every time it was accessed? That way you have the service, the last snapshot in case something broke, and an update to the snapshot every time the citation is used. - Bill Hooker

I like your idea, Bill - am I getting you correctly that using WebCite for the snapshot usage you name would actually skip the functional step of "do this set of things to it" in Cameron's previous definition of a functional citation "take object x and do this set of things to it to see what I saw" http://ff.im/7y8SA - what is your take on this Cameron? - Claudia Koltzenburg

CrossMark "Curating content over time ... allow tracking versions and additions right with the respective piece of content." (Joachim Engelland) http://network.nature.com/groups... - Claudia Koltzenburg

I would prefer to be able to do what Bill is suggesting as opposed to what I did. In this case I would have to be able to send a request to PubMed that said - give me all the references from 2008-2008 that were present on date X. But for a "real" system it would be take this data from over here and process using that script over there and then display it on this graph so you can see you get the same thing - and more importantly you can start fiddling if you have concerns. - Cameron Neylon

now that's a great new description :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg