ACAP has released some documents outlining the use cases they will be testing and some proposed changes to the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) - both robots.txt and META tags. There are some very practical proposals here to improve search engine indexing.

Hadn’t really noticed before but was fairly gobsmacked by this notice I just saw on the DOI® Handbook: And, indeed, the Handbook’s TOC only reconfirms this: That’s spooky. A book with a hidden chapter. I really don’t like that at all. Especially on a book aiming to provide general information and guidance.

Creative Commons now have a custom panel for adding CC licenses using Adobe apps - see here. Interesting on two counts: Machine readable licenses XMP metadata But I still think that batch solutions for adding XMP metadata are really required for publishing workflows. And ideally there should be support for adding arbitrary XMP packets if we’re going to have truly rich metadata.

Public comment period on the PRISM 2.0 draft ends Saturday (Sept. 15) ahead of next week’s WG meeting to review feedback and finalize the spec. (I put in some comments about XMP already.

You might have been wondering why I’ve been banging on about XMP here. Why the emphasis on one vendor technology on a blog focussed on an industry linking solution? Well, this post is an attempt to answer that. Four years ago we at Nature Publishing Group, along with a select few early adopters, started up our RSS news feeds.

( Update - 2007.09.15: Clean forgot to add in the rdf: namespace to the examples for xmp:Identifier in this post. I’ve now added in that namespace to the markup fragments listed.

Following on from the missing XMP Specification version number discussed in the previous post here below are listed some miscellaneous gripes I’ve got with XMP (on what otherwise is a very promising technology). I would be more than happy to be proved wrong on any of these points. 1. XMP version history and archive There doesn’t appear to be any XMP version history or archive hosted by Adobe as far as I can tell.

David Shorthouse and Rod Page have developed some great tools for linking references by tying together a number of services and using the Crossref OpenURL interface amongst other things.

Boy, was I ever so wrong! Contrary to what I said in yesterday’s post, the new PRISM 2.0 spec does support XMP value type mappings for its terms. See the table below which lists the PRISM basic vocabulary terms and the XMP value types.

Following on from yesterday’s post I just came across this very useful source of information on PDF/A: the PDF/A Conformance Center.

So, following up on my recent posts here on Metadata in PDFs (Strategies, Use Cases, Deployment), I finally came across PDF/A and PDF/X, two ISO standardized subsets of PDF. the former (ISO 19005-1:2005) for archiving and the latter (ISO 15929:2002, ISO 15930-1:2001, etc.) for prepress digital data exchange. Both formats share some common ground such as minimizing surprises between producer and consumer and keeping things open and predictable.