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.

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: Any volunteers?

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!

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.

Well, as I blogged on our web publishing blog Nascent we just went live with XMP labelling on Nature in yesterday’s double issue.

I wanted to make some remarks about the “Ease of use” and “Learn curve” ratings which I gave in the ORE/POWDER comparison table that I blogged about here the other day. It may seem that I came out a little harsh on ORE and a little easy on POWDER.

Following right on from yesterday’s post on ORE and POWDER, I’ve attempted to map the worked examples in the ORE User Guide for RDF/XML (specifically Sect.

I’ve been reading up on POWDER recently (the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources) which is currently in last call status (with comments due in tomorrow). This is an effort to describe groups of Web resources and as such has clear similarities to the Open Archives Initiative ORE data model,