CrossTech

Alf Eaton just posted a real nice analysis of ticTOCs RSS feeds. Good to see that almost half of the feeds (46%) are now in RDF and that fully a third (34%) are using PRISM metadata to disclose bibliographic fields.

The one downside from a CrossRef point of view is that these feeds are still using the old PRISM version (1.2) and not the new version (2.0) which was released a year ago and blogged here. That version supports the elements prism:doi for the bare DOI, as well as prism:url for the DOI proxy server URL.

There are still some improvements to be made in serving up these feeds (as Alf's analysis shows for content type), but overall things are looking pretty good. :)

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just wanted to flag up here Lisa Rogers' recent review article on RSS in FUMSI (the online magazine for information professionals published by Free Pint Ltd)

RSS and Scholarly Journal Tables of Contents: the ticTOCs Project, and Good Practice Guidelines for Publishers

Especially of interest is the diagram in Fig. 2 which breaks out the metadata elements that might be encountered in a rich web feed. Worthwhile pointing out that this reflects current practice and that under the item elements one would soon hope to see publishers routinely adding in prism:doi (with the bare DOI as value) and prism:url (with DOI target URL as value) from the PRISM 2.0 vocabulary published earlier this year. Publishers should also be aware of the new PRISM Usage Rights vocabulary which is expected to be published some time in the new year.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 05:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just put up for comment a revised mod_prism (0.3) of the existing mod_prism RSS 1.0 module. This is now updated to the current PRISM version (v2.0) which was released in February '08 and reissued with Errata in July '08. The current mod_prism draft is registered here and hosted on the PRISM site here.

The new draft charts all (five) versions of the PRISM specification (v1.0-v2.0) and maps PRISM terms to RSS 1.0 elements. Though not required as such for use of terms within an RSS 1.0 feed, an RSS 1.0 module does allow for easy housekeeping as well as providing usage guidelines and examples for how to use PRISM terms within an RSS 1.0 feed.

The main interest for CrossRef members will be the opportunity to update their current RSS 1.0 feeds to include the new PRISM terms prism:doi and prism:url. I blogged earlier here about prism:doi as it first appeared. The suggestions I put forward there were subsequently incorporated into the Errata for 2.0 which were published in July and are avaliable as a zip file here.

I would be very interested in receiving any feedback. I guess I should add to the v1.2 example of an RSS item in the draft an example also of a v2.0 RSS item which makes use of both prism:doi and prism:url.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 11:37 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)

I just posted this entry on Nascent, Nature's Web Publishing blog, about Nature's new look for web feeds which essentially boils down to our using the RSS 1.0 'mod_content' module to add in a rich content description for human consumption to complement our long-standing commitment to machine-readable descriptions. We are thus able to deliver full citation details in our RSS feeds as XHTML in CDATA sections for humans and as DC/PRISM properties for machines, the whole encoded in our feed format of choice - RSS 1.0. Note also that we declared our intention to publish parallel feeds in Atom which again will carry both human- and machine-readable citations. Further details on the RSS 1.0/Atom paired feeds will be posted here in the near future.

Perhaps of special note we have added in the DOI in our descriptions in standard CrossRef citation format and linked it to the DX resolver.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Niall Kennedy has a post about the newly released Yahoo! Pipes. As he says:

"Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr."

He also warns about possible implications for web publishers:

"Yahoo! Pipes makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content."

Note: As yet, I have not been able to access the site. Interested to learn if anybody else has and what their experiences have been.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sam Ruby responds to Brian Kelly's post about the RSS Validator and its treatment of RSS 1.0, or rather, RSS 1.0 modules. As Ruby notes:

"There is no question that RSS 1.0 is widely deployed. RSS 1.0 has a minimal core. The validation for that core is pretty solid."

Not sure if I'd seen that RSS comparison table before, but it is reassuring. (Oh, and see the really simple case off to the right. ;)

Good point, anyway about contributing test cases. I guess we should really submit a PRISM test case. And yes, the Validator is somewhat buggy as some recent testing confirms. On which more later.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 04:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sorry to be somewhat backwards, but just in case any folks didn't already know there's a couple new feeds set up recently (or at least they're newish to me :)

• News from STM (from the STM Association)
  
• eFoundations (from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston at Eduserv Foundation in the UK)
  

Posted by Tony Hammond at 06:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This post blogged by Rafael Sidi at EEI. Wiley are now dishing out RSS feeds. And moreover from a cursory inspection (see e.g. here for the American Journal of Human Biology) it seems like they are putting out RSS 1.0 (RDF) and DC/PRISM metadata. Don't know if there's anyone from Wiley who can comment on this. But this really is the best news. (Now, who else can we get to join the party. ;)

Posted by Tony Hammond at 07:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)