I blogged here back in Jan. 2007 about Adobe submitting PDF 1.7 for standardization by ISO. From yesterday’s ISO press release this: Congrats to Adobe Systems!

This test form shows handle value data being processed by JavaScript in the browser using an OpenHandle service. This is different from the handle proxy server which processes the handle data on the server - the data here is processed by the client. Enter a handle and the standard OpenHandle “Hello World” document is printed. Other processing could equally be applied to the handle values.

This is a follow-on to an earlier post which set out the lie of the land as regards DOI services and data for DOIs registered with Crossref.

With Library of Congress sometime back (Feb. ’08) announcing LCCN Permalinks and NLM also (Mar. ’08) introducing simplified web links with its PubMed identifier one might be forgiven for wondering what is the essential difference between a DOI name and these (and other) seemingly like-minded identifiers from a purely web point of view.

I was invited to speak at the Handle System Workshop which was run back to back with an IDF Open Meeting earlier this week in Brussels and hosted at the Office for Official Publications of the European Union.

A Crossref Member Briefing is available that explains how PubMed Central (PMC) links to publisher full text, how PMC uses DOIs and how PMC should be using DOIs.

Interesting post from Yahoo! Search’s Director of Product Management, Priyank Garg, “ One Standard Fits All: Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft “. Interesting also for what it doesn’t talk about. No mention here of ACAP.

As the range of public services (e.g. RSS) offered by publishers has matured this gives rise to the question: How can they expose their public data so that a user may discover them? Especially, with DOI there is now in place a persistence link infrastructure for accessing primary content. How can publishers leverage that infrastructure to advantage?

(Click to enlarge.) For infotainment only (and because it’s a pretty printing). Glimpse into the dark world of DOI. Here, the handle contents for doi:10.1038/nature06930 exposed as a standard OpenHandle ‘Hello World’ document. Browser image courtesy of Processing.js and Firefox 3 RC1.

So, why is it just so difficult to reference OpenURL? Apart from the standard itself (hardly intended for human consumption - see abstract page here and PDF and don’t even think to look at those links - they weren’t meant to be cited!), seems that the best reference is to the Wikipedia page. There is the OpenURL Registry page at http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/servlet/OAIHandler?verb=ListSets but this is just a workshop.

So, the big guns have decided that XRI is out. In a message from the TAG yesterday, variously noted as being “categorical” (Andy Powell, eFoundations) and a “proclamation” (Edd Dumbill, XML.com), the co-chairs (Tim Berners-Lee and Stuart Williams) had this to say: Alas, poor XRI.