Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.)