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)

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)

Well, Howard already blogged on Nascent last week about the STIX fonts (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange) being launched and now freely available in beta. And today the STM Association also have blogged this milestone mark. So, just for the record, I'm noting here on CrossTech those links for easy retrieval. As Howard says:

"I recommend all publishers download the fonts from the STIX web site at www.stixfonts.org today."

(And for those who want to see more of Howard, he can be found in interview here on the SIIA Executive FaceTime Webcast Series. :)

Posted by Tony Hammond at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a great exposition of FRBR (the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records model "work -> expression -> manifestation -> item") in this post from The FRBR Blog on De Revolutionibus as described in The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich. See post for the background and here (103 KB PNG) for a map of the FRBR relationships.

(Yes, and a twinkly star in the title too. ;~)

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the OASIS Press Release:

"Boston, MA, USA; 13 February 2007 -- OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved version 1.1 of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification."

Posted by Tony Hammond at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kim Cameron, Microsoft's Identity Czar and member of the Identity Gang, comments on Microsoft's announcement that they will support OpenID. Another sign that federated identity schemes are gaining traction and OpenID is likely to emerge as a standard the publishers are going to want to grapple with soon.

This follows Doc Searl's comments on the notion of "Creator Relationship Management" where he speculates that the techniques being used in federated identity schemes and the Creative Commons can be combined to create a new "silo-free" value chain amongst creators, producers and distributors.

Posted by Geoffrey Bilder at 04:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The RSC has gone live today with the results of Project Prospect, introducing semantic enrichment of journal articles across all our titles. I'm pretty sure we're the first primary research publisher to do anything of this scope.

We’re identifying chemical compounds and providing synonyms, InChIs (IUPAC's Chemical Identifier), downloadable CML (Chemical Markup Language), SMILES strings and 2D images for these compounds. In terms of subject area we're marking up terms from the IUPAC Gold Book, and also Open Biomedical Ontology terms from the Gene, Cell, and Sequence Ontologies. All this stuff is currently available from an enhanced HTML view, with the additional information and links to related articles accessed via highlights in the article and popups.

The mark-up tools have been developed together with UK academics based at the Unilever Centre of Molecular Informatics and the Computing Laboratory at Cambridge University.

At launch we have about 100 articles from our 2007 publications, with the enhanced views currently free-to-air. Feel free to take a look.

Posted by Richard Kidd at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Adobe announces today the following:

"SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 29, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)."

The full press release is here.

(Via Oleg Tkachenko's Blog.)

Posted by Tony Hammond at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)