I was happy to read David Shotton’s recent Learned Publishing article, Semantic Publishing: The Coming Revolution in scientific journal publishing , and see that he and his team have drafted a Citation Typing Ontology. ^* Anybody who has seen me speak at conferences knows that I often like to proselytize about the concept of the “typed link”, a notion that hypertext pioneer, Randy Trigg, discussed extensively in his

Discussions around “contributor Ids” (aka “Author ID, Researcher ID, etc.) seem to be becoming quite popular. In the interview that I pointed to in my last post, I mentioned that Crossref has been talking with a group of researchers who were very interested in creating some sort of authenticated contributor ID as a mechanism for controlling who gets trusted access to sensitive genome-wide aggregate genotype data.

Alf Eaton just posted a real nice analysis of ticTOCs RSS feeds. Good to see that almost half of the feeds (46%) are now in RDF and that fully a third (34%) are using PRISM metadata to disclose bibliographic fields. The one downside from a Crossref point of view is that these feeds are still using the old PRISM version (1.2) and not the new version (2.0) which was released a year ago and blogged here.

Over the past few months there seems to have been a sharp upturn in general interest around implementing an “author identifier” system for the scholarly community. This, in turn, has meant that more people have been getting in touch with us about our nascent “Contributor ID” project.

Very cool to see Alexander Griekspoor releasing an iPhone version of his award-winning Papers application. A while ago Alex intigrated DOI metadata lookup into the Mac version of papers and now I can get a silly thrill from seeing Crossref DOIs integrated in an iPhone app. Alex has just posted a preview video of the iPhone application and it includes a cameo appearance by a DOI. Yay.

The W3C has recently (Jan. 16) released CURIE Syntax 1.0 as a Candidate Recommendation and is inviting implementations. (Note that I made a fuller post here on CURIEs and erroneously confused the Editor’s Draft (Oct. 23, ’08) as being a Candidate Recommendation.

IUPAC has just released the final version (1.02) of its InChI software, which generates Standard InChIs and Standard InChIKeys.

Update about new XMP Library from Adobe Labs: “The new Adobe XMP Library for ActionScript is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. XMP is an

I was playing around recently and ran across this little metadata hack. At first, I thought somebody was doing something new. But no, nothing so forward apparently. (Heh! 🙂 I was attempting to grab the response headers from an HTTP request on an article page and was using by default the Perl LWP library. For some reason I was getting metadata elements being spewed out as response headers - at least from some of the sites I tested.

Once structured metadata is added to a file then retrieving a given metadata element is usually a doddle. For example, for PDFs with embedded XMP one can use Phil Harvey’s excellent Exiftool utility. Exiftool is a Perl library and application which I’ve blogged about here earlier which is available as a ‘.zip‘ file for Windows (no Perl required) or ‘.dmg‘ for MacOS.

Well, as I blogged on our web publishing blog Nascent we just went live with XMP labelling on Nature in yesterday’s double issue. We will be adding XMP to all new issues of Nature as well as rolling out across all our other titles in the next few weeks and months.