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)

The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape.

I love the comment an authority:

"Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

And so I suppose this means they are assigning author identifiers....

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD's head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick.

Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organizations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with "leave behinds"- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works. While researchers might prefer electronic versions of the publications for their day-to-day work, print versions of the same publications seemed to continue to play a critical role as an "awareness tool." I know that, for this very reason, several NGO/IGOs that I've spoken to have despaired of ever ramping down their print operations.

I think that the OECD might have figured out a solution to this dilemma. It's difficult to describe how viscerally satisfying it was to receive one of these Factbook USB-sticks. From the way in which the other meeting attendees swarmed around Toby as he was handing them out, I think that they might have had the same reaction.

As we headed back to London on the Eurostar, I almost immediately popped the USB stick into my laptop and started browsing through the Factbook, much as I would have thumbed through a print version of the same (although -truth be told- I would have been tempted to conveniently "forget" the print version in order to not have to shlep it from Paris back to Oxford).

In short, I think the system works. Kudos to the OECD for a simple, inexpensive and creative experiment in e-publishing.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 03:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last week we had a second face-to-face of the OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange) Technical Committee in New York, the meeting being hosted courtesy of Google. (Hence the snap here taken from the terrace of Google's canteen with its gorgeous view of midtown Manhattan. And the food's not too shabby either. ;~)

The main input to the meeting was this discussion document: Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective. This document we feel has now reached a level of maturity that we wanted to share with a wider audience. We invite feedback either directly at ore@openarchives.org or indirectly via yours truly.

The document attempts to describe the problem domain - that of describing a scholarly publication as an aggregation of resources on the Web - and to put that squarely into the Web architecture context. What the initiative is seeking to provide is machine descriptions of those resources and their relationships, something that we are inclining to call "resource maps" and as underpinning we are making use of the notion of "named graphs" from ongoing semantic web research. Essentially these resource maps are machine-readable descriptions of participating resources (in a scholarly object - both core resources and related resources) and the relationships between those resources, the whole set of assertions about those resources being named (i.e. having a URI as identifier) and having provenance information attached, e.g. publisher, date of publication, version information (still under discussion). It is envisaged that these compound object descriptions may be available in a variety of serializations from a published, object-specific URL (i.e. a good old-fashioned Web address) but some honest-to-goodness XML serialization is a likely to be one of the candidates. No surprises here, then.

Below is a schematic from the paper which shows the publication of a resource map (or named graph) corresponding to the compound object which logically represents a scholarly publication. For those objects of immediate interest to CrossRef these would likely be identified with DOI's although there is no restriction in OAI-ORE on the identifier to be used - other than it be a URI.

Update: For a couple posts from some other members of the ORE TC see here (Peter Murray, OhioLINK) and here (Pete Johnston, Eduserv).

Posted by Tony Hammond at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We updated our Project Prospect articles today to release v1.1, with a pile of look & feel improvements to the HTML views and links. The most interesting technical addition is the launch of our enhanced RSS feeds, where we have updated our existing feeds for enhanced articles. These now include ontology terms and primary compounds both visually (as text terms and 2D images) and within the RDF - using the OBO in OWL representation and the info:inchi specification mentioned here by Tony only a few weeks ago.

The enhanced entries will soon become more common as we concentrate our enhancements on our Advance Articles, but the current example below from our Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences feed is lovely. RDF code after the jump - just as beautiful to the parents...

Continue reading "RSC's Project Prospect v1.1" »

Posted by Richard Kidd at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a quick note to mention that we've now set up a new mailing list otmi-discuss@crossref.org for public discussion of OTMI - the Open Text Mining Interface proposed by Nature. See the list information page here for details on subscribing to the list and to access the mail archives.

And many thanks to the CrossRef folks for hosting this for us!

Posted by Tony Hammond at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In light of my earlier post on OTMI, the mail copied below from Sebastian Hammer at Index Data about open content may be of interest. They are looking to compile a listing of web sources of open content - see this page for further details.

(Via XML4lib and other lists.)

Continue reading "Open Content" »

Posted by Tony Hammond at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)