Blog

After a busy Online Information conference, Friday was the STM Innovations Meeting in London (presentations not online yet). There was a very nice selection of tea which helped get the morning off to a good start.

Patricia Seybold kicked off with a review of Web 2.0 that mentioned lots of sites and some good case studies:

Alexander Street Press (https://alexanderstreet.com/) - user tags combined with a taxonomy.

Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net) - share presentations

Threadless (http://www.threadless.com/) - design and vote on t-shirts

The most interesting parts of the talk were the case studies of how National Instruments and Staples have built a vibrant community of customers. Staples invited top purchasers on the their site to create product categories and sales went up 30% and now they use the categorization in physical stores and customer reviews from the web are used in stores.

The OASIS Search Web Services TC has just put out the following document for public review (Nov 7- Dec 7, 2007): _Search Web Services v1.0 Discussion Document Editable Source: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.doc PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.pdf HTML: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.html From the OASIS announcement: “This document: “Search Web Services Version 1.0 - Discussion Document - 2 November 2007”, was prepared by the OASIS Search Web Services TC as a strawman proposal, for public review, intended to generate discussion and interest.

This message posted out yesterday on the dc-general list (with following extract) may be of interest: _“Public Comment on encoding specifications for Dublin Core metadata in HTML and XHTML 2007-11-05, Public Comment is being held from 5 November through 3 December 2007 on the DCMI Proposed Recommendation, “Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements” «http://dublincore.org/documents/2007/11/05/dc-html/» by Pete Johnston and Andy Powell. Interested members of the public are invited to post comments to the DC-ARCHITECTURE mailing list «http://www.

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.

Another DCMI invitation. And a list. Lovely.

See this message (copied below) from Douglas Campbell, National Library of New Zealand, to the dc-general mailing list.

(Continues)

So, back on the old XMP tack. The simple vision from the XMP spec is that XMP packets are embedded in media files and transported along with them - and as such are relatively self-contained units, see Fig 1.

Fig. 1 - Media files with fully encapsulated descriptions.

But this is too simple. Some preliminary considerations lead us to to see why we might want to reference additional (i.e. external) sources of metadata from the original packet:

PDFs

PDFs are tightly structured and as such it can be difficult to write a new packet, or to update an existing packet. One solution proposed earlier is to embed a minimal packet which could then reference a more complete description in a standalone packet. (And in turn this standalone packet could reference additional sources of metadata.)

Images

While considerably simpler to write into web-delivery image formats (e.g. JPEG, GIF, PNG), it is the case that metadata pertinent to the image only is likely to be embedded. Also, of interest is the work from which the image is derived which is most likely to be presented externally to the image as a standalone document. (And in turn this standalone packet could reference additional sources of metadata.)

(Continues)

I’ve just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at Crossref- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?

Bruce D’Arcus left a comment here in which he linked to post of his: “OpenDocument’s New Metadata System“. Not everybody reads comments so I’m repeating it here. His post is worth reading on two counts: He talks about the new metadata functionality for OpenDocument 1.2 which uses generic RDF. As he says: > _“Unlike Microsoft’s custom schema support, we provide this through the standard model of RDF. What this means is that implementors can provide a generic metadata API in their applications, based on an open standard, most likely just using off-the-shelf code libraries.

Now, assuming XMP is a good idea - and I think on balance it is (as blogged earlier), why are we not seeing any metadata published in scholarly media files? The only drawbacks that occur to me are:

1. Hard to write - it’s too damn difficult, no tools support, etc.

   • Hard to model - rigid, “simple” XMP data model, both complicates and constrains the RDF data model

(Continues)

Interesting post from Gunar Penikis of Adobe entitled “Permanent Metadata” Oct. ’04). 1. He talks about the the issues of embedding metadata in media and comes up with this: “It may be the case that metadata in the file evolves to become a “cache of convenience” with the authoritative information living on a web service. The web service model is designed to provide the authentication and permissions needed. The link between the two provided by unique IDs.