Blog

Sorry to be somewhat backwards, but just in case any folks didn’t already know there’s a couple new feeds set up recently (or at least they’re newish to me 🙂 News from STM (from the STM Association) eFoundations (from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston at Eduserv Foundation in the UK)

Peter Murray-Rust posts on the SPARC-OpenData mailing list about a Commons for Science Conference (Oct. 3/4 in DC). The meeting is invitation-only but the papers are online (see here) and there should be public reports. The meeting underlines the importance of Open Data. There’s a brief abstract below.

<span >Just a couple comments about CrossTech: <span >1. Shouldn’t it (or couldn’t it) be linked to from the Crossref home page? (This is a public read list after all and so should be made more widely available.) Maybe at some point could be announced on some lists of interest. <span >2. Would be very nice to (at least) have a count of membership. I would also like to canvas opinions about making names of the membership public.

This post blogged by Rafael Sidi at EEI. Wiley are now dishing out RSS feeds. And moreover from a cursory inspection (see e.g. here for the American Journal of Human Biology) it seems like they are putting out RSS 1.0 (RDF) and DC/PRISM metadata. Don’t know if there’s anyone from Wiley who can comment on this. But this really is the best news. (Now, who else can we get to join the party.

The World Association of Newspapers is developing ACAP - see the press release which will be machine readable rights information that search engines would read and act on in an automated way. Rightscom is working on the project and the IPA and EPC (European Publishers Council) are involved. Publishers presenting a united front to search engines is a good thing but I’m somewhat skeptical about how such a system would work without being overly complicated.

At last week’s PRISM Face to Face meeting at Time Inc. (NY), Linda Burman raised the question of how (STM) publishers were using PRISM beyond RSS. I gave a brief presentation of how we at Nature were using PRISM: RSS (well you all know about that), Connotea (our social bookmarking tool), SRU (Search/Retrieve by URL), and OTMI (Open Text Mining Interface - which we’ll shortly be making available for wider comment).

We’ve taken the top level access control off the site. This means that anyone can read the blog but posting will be limited to those with an account (Crossref members and invited participants). This will make it possible to include the CrossTech feed in your regular RSS reader/aggregator. We’ll soon be posting some general terms and conditions for this blog and also sending a message to all Crossref members about joining so we should see membership (and activity) pick up.

On the iSpecies blog Rod Page describes how he extracts DOIs from Google Scholar results - he does use the Crossref OpenURL interface and Connotea to get DOIs too. He also says “DOIs are pretty cool” which is good!

On another blog post to SemAnt Page describes how he uses LSIDs and DOIs for Ant literature.

It seems that there is more and more of this type of use of the DOI so its great we have the OpenURL interface. Could the type of stuff that Page is doing be helped by publishers embedding metadata in their HTML pages? This could include licensing info and information for search engine crawlers.

Hi, At the moment a username and password is needed to read the CrossTech blog in addition to needing an account to post entries. However, it may be better to take off the access control to read the blog - this would mean that services like Technorati and Google could index the blog, which they can’t do at the moment and posting to the blog would be public. As people come on to the list maybe the first thing to comment on is whether we should take off the access control to read the blog.

Posted by special permission from EPS

EPS INSIGHTS :: 01/08/2006

SEMANTIC WEB: GOOGLE HAS THE ANSWERS, BUT NOT THE QUESTIONS

• The Google v. Semantic Web discussion at the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) featured plenty of confrontation and even some rational argument, but it may chiefly be remembered as the day when Google responded to the challenge of semantic web thinking by saying that the semantic web movement did not matter - thereby demonstrating that it did.

by David Worlock, Chairman