Blog

Real PRISM in the RSS Wilds

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2009 February 19

In RSS

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.

DOIs in an iPhone application

Geoffrey Bilder

Geoffrey Bilder – 2009 February 12

In Linking

Very cool to see Alexander Griekspoor releasing an iPhone version of his award-winning Papers application. A while ago Alex intigrated DOI metadata lookup into the Mac version of papers and now I can get a silly thrill from seeing Crossref DOIs integrated in an iPhone app. Alex has just posted a preview video of the iPhone application and it includes a cameo appearance by a DOI. Yay.

CURIE Syntax 1.0

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2009 January 19

In Identifiers

The W3C has recently (Jan. 16) released CURIE Syntax 1.0 as a Candidate Recommendation and is inviting implementations. (Note that I made a fuller post here on CURIEs and erroneously confused the Editor’s Draft (Oct. 23, ’08) as being a Candidate Recommendation. Well, at least it’s got there now.)

Standard InChI Defined

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2009 January 17

In IdentifiersInChI

IUPAC has just released the final version (1.02) of its InChI software, which generates Standard InChIs and Standard InChIKeys. (InChI is the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier.) The Standard InChI “removes options for properties such as tautomerism and stereoconfiguration”, so that a molecule will always generate the same stable identifier - a unique InChI - which facilitates “interoperability/compatibility between large databases/web searching and information exchange”. Note also that any “shortcomings in Standard InChI may be addressed using non-Standard InChI (currently obtainable using InChI version 1.

XMP Library for Flash

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2009 January 16

In XMP

Update about new XMP Library from Adobe Labs: “The new Adobe XMP Library for ActionScript is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. XMP is an open technology based on RDF and RDF/XML. With this new library you can read existing XMP metadata from Flash based file formats via the Adobe Flash Player.

Poorboy Metadata Hack

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2009 January 06

In Metadata

I was playing around recently and ran across this little metadata hack. At first, I thought somebody was doing something new. But no, nothing so forward apparently. (Heh! 🙂 I was attempting to grab the response headers from an HTTP request on an article page and was using by default the Perl LWP library. For some reason I was getting metadata elements being spewed out as response headers - at least from some of the sites I tested.

And the DOI is …

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2008 December 22

In Metadata

Once structured metadata is added to a file then retrieving a given metadata element is usually a doddle. For example, for PDFs with embedded XMP one can use Phil Harvey’s excellent Exiftool utility. Exiftool is a Perl library and application which I’ve blogged about here earlier which is available as a ‘.zip‘ file for Windows (no Perl required) or ‘.dmg‘ for MacOS. Note that Phil maintains this actively and has done so over the last five years.

Xmas XMP

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2008 December 19

In XMP

Well, as I blogged on our web publishing blog Nascent we just went live with XMP labelling on Nature in yesterday’s double issue. We will be adding XMP to all new issues of Nature as well as rolling out across all our other titles in the next few weeks and months. The screenshots below from Acrobat (File > Properties, CMD-D / CTL-D) show what the user might see both with (bottom-left) and without (top-right) semantic markup.

ORE/POWDER: Remarks on Ratings

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2008 December 06

In Linking

I wanted to make some remarks about the “Ease of use” and “Learn curve” ratings which I gave in the ORE/POWDER comparison table that I blogged about here the other day. It may seem that I came out a little harsh on ORE and a little easy on POWDER. I just wanted to rationalize the justification for calling it that way. (By the way, the revised comparison table includes a qualification to those ratings.)

My primary interest was from the perspective of a data provider rather than a data consumer. What does it take to get a resource description document (“resource map”, “description resource” or “sitemap”) ready for publication?

(Continues)

Resource Maps Encoded in POWDER

Tony Hammond

Tony Hammond – 2008 December 05

In Linking

Following right on from yesterday’s post on ORE and POWDER, I’ve attempted to map the worked examples in the ORE User Guide for RDF/XML (specifically Sect. 3) to POWDER to show that POWDER can be used to model ORE, see Resource Maps Encoded in POWDER (A full explanation for each example is given in the RDF/XML Guide, Sect. 3 which should be consulted.) This could just all be sheer doolally or might possibly turn out to have a modicum of instructional value – I don’t know.