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Interesting post from Google, in which they say: “Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!” Puts Crossref’s 32,639,020 unique DOIs into some kind of perspective: 0.0033%. But nonetheless that trace percentage still seems to me to be reasonably large, especially in view of it forming a persistent and curated set.

Oh wow! A rather remarkable plea here from Dan Brickley on the public-lod mailing list which calls for the registrant of the dbpedia.org DNS entry to top it up with another 5+ years worth of clocktime. Some quotes: _“The idea of such a cool RDF namespace having only 6 months left on the DNS registration gives me the worries.” “If you could add another 5-10 years to the DNS registration I’d sleep easier at night.

So, Google’s Knol is now live (see this announcement on Google’s Blog). There’ll be comment aplenty about the merits of this service and how it compares to other user contributed content sites. But one curious detail struck me. In terms of citeability, compare how a Knol contribution (or “knol”) may be linked to as may be a corresponding entry in Wikipedia (here I’ve chosen the subject “Eclipse”): Knol https://web.archive.org/web/20080730124803/http://knol.google.com/k/jay-pasachoff/eclipse/IDZ0Z-SC/wTLUGw Wikipedia

CrossTech is two years old (less one month) and we have now seen some 145 posts. Breaking the posts down by poster we arrive at the following chart: Note this is not any real attempt at vainglory, more a simple excuse to play with the wonderful Google Chart API. Also, above I’ve taken the liberty of putting up an image (.png), although the chart could have been generated on the fly from this link (or tinyurl here).

Roy Tennant in a post to XML4Lib announces a new list of library APIs hosted at https://web.archive.org/web/20080730080413/http://techessence.info/apis// A useful rough guide for us publishers to consider as we begin cultivating the multiple access routes into our own content platforms and tending to the “alphabet soup” that taken together comprises our public interfaces.

Andy Powell has published on Slideshare this talk about metadata - see his eFoundations post for notes. It’s 130 slides long and aims “to cover a broad sweep of history from library cataloguing, thru the Dublin Core, Web search engines, IEEE LOM, the Semantic Web, arXiv, institutional repositories and more.” Don’t be fooled by the length though. This is a flip through and is a readily accessible overview on the importance of metadata.

The PRISM metadata standards group issued a press release yesterday which covered three points: PRISM Cookbook The Cookbook provides “a set of practical implementation steps for a chosen set of use cases and provides insights into more sophisticated PRISM capabilities. While PRISM has 3 profiles, the cookbook only addresses the most commonly used profile #1, the well-formed XML profile. All recipes begin with a basic description of the business purpose it fulfills, followed by ingredients (typically a set of PRISM metadata fields or elements), and, closes with a step-by-step implementation method with sample XMLs and illustrative images.

With PDF now passed over to ISO as keeper of the format (as blogged here on CrossTech), Kas Thomas (on CMS Watch’s TrendWatch) blogs here that Adobe should now do the right thing by XMP and look to hand that over too in order to establish it as a truly open standard. As he says: “Let’s cut to the chase. If Adobe wants to demonstrate its commitment to openness, it should do for XMP what it has already done for PDF: Put it in the hands of a legitimate standards body.

I blogged here back in Jan. 2007 about Adobe submitting PDF 1.7 for standardization by ISO. From yesterday’s ISO press release this: “The new standard, ISO 32000-1, Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7, is based on the PDF version 1.7 developed by Adobe. This International Standard supplies the essential information needed by developers of software that create PDF files (conforming writers), software that reads existing PDF files and interprets their contents for display and interaction (conforming readers), and PDF products that read and/or write PDF files for a variety of other purposes (conforming products).

For anybody interested in the why’s and wherefore’s of OpenURL, Jeff Young at OCLC has started posting over on his blog Q6: 6 Questions - A simpler way to understand OpenURL 1.0: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How (note: no longer available online). He’s already amassing quite a collection of thought provoking posts. His latest is The Potential of OpenURL (note: no longer available online), from which: OpenURL has effectively cornered the niche market where Referrers need to be decoupled from Resolvers.