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(Update - 2007.10.02: Just realized that there were some serious flaws in the post below regarding publication and form of namespace URIs which I’ve now addressed in a subsequent post here.)

By way of experimenting with a use case for ISO URNs, below is a listing of the document metadata for an arbitrary PDF. (You can judge for yourselves whether the metadata disclosed here is sufficient to describe the document.) Here, the metadata is taken from the information dictionary and from the document metadata stream (XMP packet).

The metadata is expressed in RDF/N3. That may not be a surprise for the XMP packet which is serialized in RDF/XML, as it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to render it as RDF/N3 with properties taken from schema whose namespaces are identified by URI. What may be more unusual is to see the document information dictionary metadata (the “normal” metadata in a PDF) rendered as RDF/N3 since the information dictionary is not nodelled on RDF, not expressed in XML, and not namespaced. Here, in addition to the trusty HTTP URI scheme, I’ve made use of two particular URI schemes: “iso:” URN namespaces, and “data:” URIs.

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ISO has registered with the IANA a URN namespace identifier (“iso:”) for ISO persistent resources. From the Internet-Draft: “This URN NID is intended for use for the identification of persistent resources published by the ISO standards body (including documents, document metadata, extracted resources such as standard schemata and standard value sets, and other resources).” The toplevel grammar rules (ABNF) give some indication of scope: NSS = std-nss std-nss = “std:” docidentifier *supplement *docelement [addition]

On the subject of author IDs (a subject Crossref is interested in and on which held a meeting earlier this year, as blogged about here), this post by Karen Coyle “Name authority control, aka name identification” may be worth a read. She starts off with this: “Libraries do something they call “name authority control”. For most people in IT, this would be called “assigning unique identifiers to names.” Identifying authors is considered one of the essential aspects of library cataloging, and it isn’t done in any other bibliographic environment, as far as I know.

Been so busy looking into the technical details of XMP that I almost forgot to check out the current landcsape. Luckily I chanced on these articles by Ron Roszkiewicz for The Seybold Report (and apologies for lifting the title of this post from his last). The articles about XMP are well worth reading and chart the painful progress made to date:

• The Brief Tortured Life of XMP (July ’05)
  • [Thought Leaders Hammer out Metadata Standard] (April ’07)

    • [Metadata Persistence and “Save for Web…”] (July ’07)

    From the earlier characterization of XMP as “underachieving teenager” Roszkiewicz is cautiously optimistic that IDEAlliance’s XMP Open initiative (an initiative to advance XMP as an open industry specification) will help outreach and foster adoption of this fledgling technology.

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I’m always curious about names and where they come from and what they mean. Hence, my interest was aroused with the constant references to “XAP” in XMP. As the XMP Specification (Sept. 2005) says:

“NOTE: The string “XAP” or “xap” appears in some namespaces, keywords, and related names in this document and in stored XMP data. It reflects an early internal code name for XMP; the names have been preserved for compatibility purposes.”

Actually, it occurs in most of the core namespaces: XAP, rather than XMP.

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ACAP has released some documents outlining the use cases they will be testing and some proposed changes to the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) - both robots.txt and META tags. There are some very practical proposals here to improve search engine indexing. However, the only search engine publicly participating in the project is http://www.exalead.com/ (which according to Alexa attracted 0.0043% of global internet visits over the last three months). The main docs are “ACAP pilot Summary use cases being tested”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 1”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 2”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Usage Definitions - draft for pilot testing”.

A couple of recent posts - from A couple of recent posts - from at Jefferson University and IFST at Univ of Delaware- note that the AMA and APA style guides now recommend using a DOI, if one is assigned, in a journal article citation.

A citation in the APA style with a DOI would be:

Conley, D., Pfeiffera, K. M., & Velez, M. (2007). Explaining sibling differences in achievement and behavioral outcomes: The importance of within- and between-family factors. Social Science Research36(3), 1087-1104. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2006.09.002

In the AMA style a reference would be:

Kitajima TS, Kawashima SA, Watanabe Y. The conserved kinetochore protein shugoshin protects centromeric cohesion during meiosis. Nature. 2004;427(6974):510-517. doi:10.1038/nature02312

This is great news. I haven’t looked at the full style guides but it’s not clear if information is given about linking DOIs via http://0-dx-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/

Hadn’t really noticed before but was fairly gobsmacked by this notice I just saw on the DOI® Handbook: **Please note that Chapter 9, Operating Procedures is for Registration Agency personnel only.** DOI® Handbook doi:10.1000/182 http://0-www-doi-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/hb.html And, indeed, the Handbook’s TOC only reconfirms this: 9 Operating procedures* *The RA password is required for viewing Chapter 9. 9.1 Registering a DOI name with associated metadata 9.2 Prefix assignment 9.3 Transferring DOI names from one Registrant to another

Creative Commons now have a custom panel for adding CC licenses using Adobe apps - see here. Interesting on two counts: Machine readable licenses XMP metadata But I still think that batch solutions for adding XMP metadata are really required for publishing workflows. And ideally there should be support for adding arbitrary XMP packets if we’re going to have truly rich metadata. I rather fear the constraints that custom panels place upon the publisher.

Public comment period on the PRISM 2.0 draft ends Saturday (Sept. 15) ahead of next week’s WG meeting to review feedback and finalize the spec. (I put in some comments about XMP already. Hope they got that.)