IOTA FAQ

We can use this page to document questions and answers that user’s of the IOTA system may have.

Question: What is IOTA?

Answer: IOTA, Improving OpenURL Through Analytics, is an initiative that makes use of log files from various institutions and vendors to analyze element frequency and patterns contained within OpenURL strings. The reports created from this analysis allows users to make improvements to their OpenURL strings (by increasing the number of elements passed in an OpenURL string for example) so that the maximum number of OpenURL requests resolve to a correct record.

Question: What are the core elements presented in the IOTA reports?

Answer:

Element Name	Element Definition
sid	The service identifier or referrer id. This element identifies the party or application that originated the OpenURL request.
title	The title of the item. It should only be used with OpenURL0.1 compliant URLs. OpenURL1.0 compliant URLs should use jtitle/btitle instead of title.
btitle	The title of the book. If the item is a book chapter, both the btitle (book title) and atitle (book chapter title) should be included in the URL.
jtitle	The title of the journal. The full journal title should be used. Use 'stitle' for journal title abbreviations.
spage	The starting page number of the item.
volume	The volume of the journal issue the item appears in. Volume is typically expressed as a number, but may be roman numerals or non-numeric.
issue	The issue number of the published issue of the journal that the item appears in. While usually numeric, it could be non-numeric. Note that some publications use chronology in the place of enumeration.
date	The date of publication of the item, typically expressed as a 4-digit year.
aulast	The first author's family name. This may be more than one word, if the name contains particles.
issn	The International Standard Serials Number assigned to the journal. The issn may contain a hyphen.
atitle	The title of the item (article or book chapter).
doi	The Digital Object Identifier, typically assigned by the publisher and registered with Crossref.
isbn	The International Standard Book Number assigned to the book. The ISBN is usually presented as 9 digits plus a checksum (which may be 'X'). After 2007, 13 digit ISBNs are used. Hyphens should be included.
eissn	The ISSN of the electronic version of the journal.
pmid	The PubMed Identifier assigned to the item.

Question: How were the core elements determined?

Answer: The core elements were determined based on analysis of all elements in the log file and identification of those occuring most frequently when passing the data into the proprietary link-to that carries the request from the link resolver into the target site.

Who is IOTA?

The IOTA roster is listed on the NISO site.