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<span >(<b>Update - 2007.07.28:</b> I meant to reference in this entry Pierre Lindenbaum’s post back in May <a href="http://plindenbaum.blogspot.com/2007/05/is-there-any-xmp-in-scientific-pdf-no.html">Is there any XMP in scientific pdf ? (No)</a>, which btw also references Roderic Page’s post on <a href="http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/05/xmp.html">XMP</a> but forgot to add in the links in my haste to scoot off. Well, truth is we still can’t answer Pierre in the affirmative but at least we can take the first steps towards rectifying this.)

<span >I’ve been revisiting Adobe’s <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/">XMP</a> just recently. (I blogged <a href="/blog/xmp-capabilities-extended//">here</a> about the new <a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/">XMP Toolkit 4.1</a> back in March.)

<span >I wanted to share some of my early experiences. First off, after a couple of previous attempts which got pushed aside due to other projects, I managed to compile the libraries and the sample apps that ship with the C++ SDK under Xcode on the Mac. I also needed to compile <a href="https://libexpat.github.io/">Expat</a> first which doesn’t ship with the distribution.

<span >OK, so far, so good. What this basically leaves one with is a couple of XMP dump utilities (<i>DumpMainXMP</i> and <i>DumpScannedXMP</i>) and two others (<i>XMPCoreCoverage</i> and <i>XMPFilesCoverage</i>) which is a good start anyways for exploring. And turns out that our PDFs already have some workflow metadata in them. This is encouraging because the SDK allows apps to read and update existing XMP packets from files, though not to write new packets into files (as far as I understand).

<span >I thought I would take this opportunity anyway to:

1. <span >See what XMP metadata terms we might consider adding

• <span >Try and add these to existing XMP packets<span >Ugly details are presented below, but by updating the XMP packet metadata in one of our PDFs (<i>Nature 445, 37 (2007), C.J. Hogan</i>) we can teach Acrobat Reader to read - see the “before” (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130815224916/http://nurture.nature.com/">PDF here</a>) and “after” (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130815224916/http://nurture.nature.com/">PDF here</a>) screenshots in the figure.

  <span ><img src="/wp/blog/images/acrobats.png" alt="acrobats.png" width="583" height="466" />

  <span >Of course, this is really about much more than getting Adobe apps to read/write metadata. It’s about using XMP as a standard platform for embedding metadata in digital assets for <i>third-party apps</i> to read/write. If we can put ID3 tags into our podcasts then why not XMP packets into other media?</p>

With these words: _“There was quite some interest in Linked Data at this year’s World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007). Therefore, Richard Cyganiak, Tom Heath and I decided to write a tutorial about how to publish Linked Data on the Web, so that interested people can find all relevant information, best practices and references in a single place.”_ Chris Bizer announces this draft How to Publish Linked Data on the Web. It’s a bright and breezy tutorial and useful (to me, anyway) for disclosing a couple of links:

Seems that there’s life in the old dog yet. :~) See this post about PURL from Thom Hickey, OCLC, This extract: OCLC has contracted with Zepheira to reimplement the PURL code which has become a bit out of date over the years. The new code will be in written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Just posted on Nascent a brief account of a presentation I gave recently on OTMI at BioNLP 2007. The post lists some of the feedback I received. We are very interested to get further comments so do feel free to contribute comments either directly to the post, privately to otmi@nature.com, or publicly to otmi-discuss@crossref.org. And then there’s always the OTMI wiki available for comment at http://opentextmining.org/. It is important to note that OTMI is not a universal panacea but rather an attempt at bridging the gap between publisher and researcher.

Nice entry article on PRISM here by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM’s DeveloperWorks.

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD’s head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick. Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organizations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with “leave behinds”- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works.

OASIS has just announced a technical committee for standardising search services. This from the Call for Participation: _ b. Purpose To define Search and Retrieval Web Services, combining various current and ongoing web service activities. Within recent years there has been a growth in activity in the development of web service definitions for search and retrieval applications. These include SRU, a web service based in part on the NISO/ISO Search and Retrieval standards;

Please see the details of the IDF Annual Meeting and a related Handle System Workshop in Washington, DC on June 21 which may be of interest - http://www.crossref.org/crweblog/2007/06/international_doi_foundation_a.html

Last week we had a second face-to-face of the OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange) Technical Committee in New York, the meeting being hosted courtesy of Google. (Hence the snap here taken from the terrace of Google’s canteen with its gorgeous view of midtown Manhattan. And the food’s not too shabby either. ;~) The main input to the meeting was this discussion document: Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective.

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…