At DataCite we aim to be as open as possible, facilitating access to our resources from third parties. In this context we would like to present three external tools that might be useful.
When we want to assign a DOI to a new dataset it is sometimes complex to create the XML metadata required. Christian Pietsch, from the Bielefeld University Library (Germany) prototyped a DataCite metadata creator in a Python web framework:
https://github.com/pietsch/DataCite-Metadata-Creator-Django
You can contact Christian at christian.pietsch+datacite@uni-bielefeld.de.
Raffaele Messuti, from the University of Bologna (Italy) has created a minimal webapp which given a summary page of a document or data repository and its OAI-PMH endpoint gets the OAI_DC record, apply an XSL stylesheet to convert the schema to DataCite, and call the API to mint the DOI. You can find it in:
https://github.com/atomotic/oaidc-datacite-web
You can contact Raffaele at raffaele.messuti2@unibo.it.
Marcin Paluch, from CISTI (National Research Council Canada) has developed an HTML form for generating the mandatory metadata elements. Although it's rather basic it's also light weight and doesn't require any server back end. This tool could also be expanded to add other elements and even to do minting with CORS support on the DataCite servers.
You can download the code from here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24348767/datacite_meta_gen.zip
You just need to save it to your computer and open it up in a web browser. You'll see that you can start creating metadata right away without the need for any web hosting services or an application server.
You can contact Marcin at Marcin.Paluch@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca.
Tanya Gray and David Shotton, from the University of Oxford (UK) have created a DataCite Metadata Input Form. This tool allows you to load an existing DataCite Metadata Report or just start typing to create a new DataCite Metadata Report. It will create for you a single DataCite Metadata Report as an XML document containing the metadata entered. Another possible output format from the tool is DataCite metadata in RDF. You can find it at:
http://www.miidi.org:8020/datacite/
You can contact David at david.shotton@zoo.ox.ac.uk and Tanya at tanya.gray@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
David has also created, together with Silvio Peroni of the University of Bologna the mapping of the DataCite metadata kernel to RDF, which is used by the DataCite Metadata Input Form to create RDF output. This tool is described at
http://semanticpublishing.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/revising-datacite2rdf...
You might also want to read the preceding and following posts in the blog.
If you want to contact Silvio you can do so at essepuntato@cs.unibo.it.
Do you have any tool you would like us to comment at the DataCite website? Please, let us know: Sergio.Ruiz@datacite.org.