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I’ve been reading up on POWDER recently (the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources) which is currently in last call status (with comments due in tomorrow). This is an effort to describe groups of Web resources and as such has clear similarities to the Open Archives Initiative ORE data model, which has been blogged about here before. In an attempt to better understand the similarities (and differences) between the two data models, I’ve put up the table which directly compares the two heavyweight contendors OAI-ORE and POWDER and also (unfairly) places them alongside the featherweight Sitemaps Protocol for reference.

So the other day Noel O’Boyle made me feel guilty when he pinged me and asked about the possibility using one of the Crossref APIs for creating a Ubiquity extension. You see, I had played with the idea myself and had not gotten around to doing much about it. This seemed inexcusable- particularly given how easy it is to build such extensions using the API we developed for the WordPress and Moveable Type plugins that we announced earlier in the year.

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

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.

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.

I just ran across the final report from the CLADDIER project. CLADDIER comes from the JISC and stands for “CITATION, LOCATION, And DEPOSITION IN DISCIPLINE & INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES”. I suspect JISC has an entire department dedicated to creating impossible acronyms (the JISC Acronym Preparation Executive?) Anyhoo- the report describes a distributed citation location and updating service based on the linkback mechanism that is widely used in the blogging community. I think this is an interesting approach and is one that I talked about briefly (PDF) at the UKSG’s Measure for Measure seminar last June.

I’ve just returned from Frankfurt Book fair and noticed that there has been some recent in the The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors and Publishers recommendations concerning citing blogs.

Which reminds me of an issue that has periodically been raised here at Crossref- should we be doing something to try and provide a service for reliably citing more ephemeral content such as blogs, wikis, etc.?

The first thing to note is that this demo (the Acrobat plugin) is an application. And that comes with its own baggage, i.e. this is a Windows only plugin and is targeted at Acrobat Reader 8. On a wider purview the application merely bridges an identifier embedded in the media file and the handle record filed against that identifier and delivers some relevant functionality. The data (or metadata) declared in the PDF and in the associated handle if rich enough and structured openly can also be used by other applications. I think this is a key point worth bearing in mind, that the demo besides showing off new functionalities is also demonstrating how data (or metadata) can be embedded at the respective endpoints (PDF, handle).

Some initial observations follow below.

I posted here about an initial meeting of the OAI-ORE Technical WG back in January. ORE is the “Object Reuse and Exchange” initiative which is aiming to provide a formalism for describing scholarly works as complete units (or packages) of information on the Web using resource maps which would be available from public access points. From a DOI perspective this work is intimately connected with multiple resolution. For further updates on this work, see here for a presentation by Herbert Van de Sompel on OAI-ORE at the OAI5 Workshop (5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication) held a couple weeks back at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

Was just reminded (thanks, Tim) of the possibility of using a special tag in bookmarking services to tag links to documents of interest to a given community. I think this is a fairly well-established practice. Note that e.g. the OAI-ORE project is using Connotea to bookmark pages of interest and tagging them “oaiore” which can then be easily retrieved using the link http://web.archive.org/web/20160402182544/http://www.connotea.org/. I would suggest that Crossref members might like to consider using the tag “crosstech” in bookmarking pages about publishing technology, so that the following links might be used to retrieve documents of interest to this readership: