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.

Following on from yesterday’s post about making metadata available on our Web pages, I wanted to ask here about “metadata reuse policies”. Does anybody have a clue as to what might constitute a best practice in this area? I’m specifically interested in license terms, rather than how those terms would be encoded or carried.

Well, we may not be the first but wanted anyway to report that Nature has now embedded metadata (HTML meta tags) into all its newly published pages including full text, abstracts and landing pages (all bar four titles which are currently being worked on). Metadata coverage extends back through the Nature archives (and depth of coverage varies depending on title). This conforms to the W3C’s Guideline 13.2 in the Web Content Accessibility

Further to my previous post “NIH Mandate and PMCIDs” we’ve been looking into linking to articles on publishers’ sites from PubMed Central (PMC). There are a couple of ways this happens currently (see details below) but these are complicated and will lead to broken links and more difficulty for PMC and publishers in managing the links. Crossref is going to be putting together a briefing note for its members on this soon.

Following up the earlier post on OpenHandle, there are now a number of language examples which have been contributed to the project. The diagram below shows the OpenHandle service in schematic with various languages support. Briefly, OpenHandle aims to provide a web services interface to the Handle System to simplify access to the data stored for a given Handle.

The NIH Public Access Policy says “When citing their NIH-funded articles in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, authors must include the PubMed Central reference number for each article” and the FAQ provides some examples of this: Examples: Varmus H, Klausner R, Zerhouni E, Acharya T, Daar A, Singer P. 2003. PUBLIC HEALTH: Grand Challenges in Global Health. Science 302(5644): 398-399.

Last week Pablo Fernicola sent me email announcing that Microsoft have finally released a beta of their Word plugin for marking-up manuscripts with the NLM DTD.

Just announced on the handle-info and semantic-web mailing lists is the OpenHandle project on Google Code. This may be of some interest to the DOI community as it allows the handle record underpinning the DOI to be exposed in various common text-based serializations to make the data stored within the records more accessible to Web applications. Initial serializations include RDF/XML, RDF/N3, and JSON.

On March 3rd the Open Archives Initiative held a roll out meeting of the first alpha release of the ORE specification (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) . According to Herbert Van de Sompel a beta release is planned for late March / early April and a 1.0 release targeted for September. The presentations focused on the aggregation concepts behind ORE and described an ATOM based implementation.

Following on from my previous post about prism:doi I didn’t mention, or reference, the ongoing ISO work on DOI, Indeed I hadn’t realized that the DOI site now has a status update on the ISO work:

The new PRISM spec (v. 2.0) was published this week, see the press release. (Downloads are available here.) This is a significant development as there is support for XMP profiles, to complement the existing XML and RDF/XML profiles.