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In light of my earlier post on OTMI, the mail copied below from Sebastian Hammer at Index Data about open content may be of interest. They are looking to compile a listing of web sources of open content - see this page for further details.

(Via XML4lib and other lists.)

We’ve just posted an update about OTMI (the Open Text Mining Interface) on our Web Publishing blog Nascent. This post details the following changes: Contact email - otmi@nature.com Wiki - http://opentextmining.org/ Repository - https://web.archive.org/web/20090706181310/http://0-www-nature-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/otmi/journals.opml The OTMI content repository currently provides two years’ worth of full text across five of our titles: Nature Nature Genetics Nature Reviews Drug Discovery Nature Structural & Molecular Biology The Pharmacogenomics Journal See the wiki for draft technical specs and for a sample script to generate the OTMI files.

Just in case anybody may not have seen this, here‘s the testimony of Sir Tim Berners-Lee yesterday before a House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Required reading. (Via this post yesterday in the Save the Internet blog.)

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.

Update: All apologies to Google. Apparently this was a problem at our end which our IT folks are currently investigating. (And I thought it was just me. 🙂 Just managed to get this page: _“Google Error We’re sorry… … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon.

The info registry has now added in the InChI namespace (see registry entry here) which now means that chemical compounds identified by InChIs (IUPAC‘s International Chemical Identifiers) are expressible in URI form and thus amenable to many Web-based description technologies that use URI as the means to identify objects, e.g. XLink, RDF, etc. As an example, the InChI identifier for naphthalene is InChI=1/C10H8/c1-2-6-10-8-4-3-7-9(10)5-1/h1-8H and can now be legitimately expressed in URI form as

Jon Udell interviews Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, see his blog entry: “A conversation with Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, context-sensitive linking, and digital archiving”. The podcast of the interview is available here. Interesting to see these kind of subjects beginning to be covered by a respected technology writer like Jon. As he says in his post: “I have ventured into this confusing landscape because I think that the issues that libraries and academic publishers are wrestling with — persistent long-term storage, permanent URLs, reliable citation indexing and analysis — are ones that will matter to many businesses and individuals.

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.”

Niall Kennedy has a post about the newly released Yahoo! Pipes. As he says: “Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr.” He also warns about possible implications for web publishers: “Yahoo! Pipes makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content.

Sam Ruby responds to Brian Kelly’s post about the RSS Validator and its treatment of RSS 1.0, or rather, RSS 1.0 modules. As Ruby notes: “There is no question that RSS 1.0 is widely deployed. RSS 1.0 has a minimal core. The validation for that core is pretty solid.” Not sure if I’d seen that RSS comparison table before, but it is reassuring. (Oh, and see the really simple case off to the right.