I’ve just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Bruce D’Arcus left a comment here in which he linked to post of his: “OpenDocument’s New Metadata System“. Not everybody reads comments so I’m repeating it here. His post is worth reading on two counts: He talks about the new metadata functionality for OpenDocument 1.2 which uses generic RDF. As he says: > _“Unlike Microsoft’s custom schema support, we provide this through the standard model of RDF.

Now, assuming XMP is a good idea - and I think on balance it is (as blogged earlier), why are we not seeing any metadata published in scholarly media files? The only drawbacks that occur to me are: Hard to write - it’s too damn difficult, no tools support, etc. Hard to model - rigid, “simple” XMP data model, both complicates and constrains the RDF data model Well, I don’t really believe that 1) is too difficult to overcome.

Interesting post from Gunar Penikis of Adobe entitled “Permanent Metadata” Oct. ’04). ¹ . He talks about the the issues of embedding metadata in media and comes up with this: An intriguing idea. Of course, Gunar’s (and Adobe’s) preoccupations with metadata revolve mainly around document workflow whereas, at least as things stand currently, scholarly publisher concerns are mainly with the dissemination of media in final form.

Last week, my colleague Ian Mulvany posted on Nascent an entry about NSF’s recent call for proposals on DataNet (aka “A Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network”). Peter Brantley, of DLF, has set up a public group DataNet on Nature Network where all are welcome to join in the discussion on what NSF effectively are viewing as the challenge of dealing with “big data”. As Ian notes in a mail to me:

(Click image to enlarge.) Following up on previous posts on OTMI (the proposal from NPG for scholarly publishers to syndicate their full text to drive text-mining applications), Fabien Campagne from Cornell, a long-time OTMI supporter, has created an OTMI-driven search engine (based on his Twease work). This may be the first publicly accessible OTMI-based service.

Just noticed that there is now (as of last month) a blog for Mars (“Mars: Comments on PDF, Acrobat, XML, and the Mars file format”). See this from the initial post:

Was reminded to blog about this after reading Lorcan’s post on the Names Project being run by JISC.

This This was just sent out to the DC-GENERAL mailing list about the new DCMI Community for Scholarly Communications. As Julie Allinson says: There’s also a DC-SCHOLAR mailing list (subscribe here). Not too much there yet, but it may be useful to track - or even to participate.

Oh dear. Yesterday’s post “Using ISO URNs” was way off the mark. I don’t know. I thought that walk after lunch had cleared my mind. But apparently not. I guess I was fixing on eyeballing the result in RDF/N3 rather than the logic to arrive at that result.

The InChI (International Chemical Identifier from IUPAC) has been blogged earlier here. RSC have especially taken this on board in their Project Prospect and now routinely syndicate InChI identifiers in their RSS feeds as blogged here.