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)

From the beginning our OpenURL resolver has had a non standard feature of returning metadata in response to a request instead of redirecting to the referrent. This feature returned one of our older XML formats which is a bit limited as to the fields it contains.

Sometime after our resolver was deployed we introduced a more verbose XML format for DOI metadata called 'UNIXREF". This was always available to regular queries against the CrossRef system but was never introduced to the OpenURL resolver (for no particular reason).

We've since learned that some user's are relying on the OpenURL's metadata feature to build proper references in situations where they have a DOI and that the older XML format is insufficient. Therefor I've added a 'format' parameter to our OpenURL resolver which allows one to request the more verbose UNIXREF. (see www.crossref.org/openurl)

As always please feel free to contact us regarding new features or changes to existing features that might be helpful.

Regards,
Chuck

Posted by Chuck Koscher at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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)

Although most folks will already know about this it still seems significant enough to blog the arrival of XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2.0, and XPath 2.0. See the W3C Press Release.

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

Nice piece of advocacy here by Tim Bray for RELAX. High time to see someone standing up for RELAX - a much friendlier XML schema language.

Posted by Tony Hammond at 04:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)