CrossTech

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. I say "finally" because we've know this was on the way and have been pretty excited to see it. We once even hoped that MS might be able to show the plug-in at the ALPSP session on the NLM DTD, but we couldn't quite manage it.

The plugin is targeted at production/editorial staff, but, of course, it will be interesting to see if any of this work can be pushed back to the author. I won't hold my breath on the latter score, but it will be fun to watch.

One thing I would note is that the NLM DTD can also be used in the humanities and social sciences, so, frankly, I think they should market it more broadly.

Anyway- the plugin can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.

And Pablo has setup a blog where testers can discuss the add-in.

And there is also an entry for the project on the Microsoft Research site (an interesting place to peruse, if you have a moment).

Congatulations to Pablo and his team.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

We'd be very interested in receiving feedback on this project - either on this blog or over on the project wiki.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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. ORE is the second project from the OAI but unlike its sibling PMH it is not exclusively a repository technology. ORE provides machine readable manifests for related Web resources in any context. For instance, DOI landing pages (aka splash page) are human readable resources containing links to any number of resources related to the work identified by the DOI. An ORE instance for the DOI (called a Rem or resource map) would describe the same set of resources in a machine friendly format. A standardized form of redirection understood by the DOI proxy would yield the Rem instead of normal page (e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.5555/abcd?type=rem) which could be useful for crawlers.

A second roll out meeting is planned during the Sparc-08 workshops in early April.

Posted by Chuck Koscher at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)