Month: September 2007

Authors in Context?

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.”

and concludes thus:

“Perhaps the days of looking at lists of authors’ names is over. Maybe users need to see a cloud of authors connected to topic areas in which they have published, or related to books titles or institutional affiliations. In this time of author abundance, names are not meaningful without some context.”

XMP-Ville

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:

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.
(Continues.)

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The Name’s The Thing

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 Specifcation (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.
(Continues.)

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ACAP – Any chance of success?

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”.
What would cause other search engines to recognize the ACAP protocols rather than ignore them? A lot of publishers implementing this and requiring search engines to recognize it to index content could put pressure on the engines. Maybe.

Style Guides Recommend DOI strings

A couple of recent posts – from Scott Memorial Library 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://dx.doi.org/

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Chapter 9 – The Closed Book

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://www.doi.org/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
9.4 Handle System® policies and procedures
9.4.1 Overview
9.4.2 Policies and Procedures
9.4.3 Requirements for Administrators of Resolution Services
9.4.4 Protocols and Interfaces
9.5 DOI® System error messages

That’s spooky. A book with a hidden chapter. I really don’t like that at all. Especially on a book aiming to provide general information and guidance. Seems to be that if that information needs to be kept private to RA’s then it has no business rubbing shoulders with public information. I would suggest that the material be opened up or else moved out. Makes me feel so second class.

Custom Panel for CC

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.

The Second Wave

You might have been wondering why I’ve been banging on about XMP here. Why the emphasis on one vendor technology on a blog focussed on an industry linking solution? Well, this post is an attempt to answer that.
Four years ago we at Nature Publishing Group, along with a select few early adopters, started up our RSS news feeds. We chose to use RSS 1.0 as the platform of choice which allowed us to embed a rich metadata term set using multiple schemas – especially Dublin Core and PRISM. We evangelized this much at the time and published documents on XML.com (Jul. ’03) and in D-Lib Magazine (Dec. ’04) as well as speaking about this at various meetings and blogging about it. Since that time many more publishers have come on board and now provide RSS routinely, many of them choosing to enrich their feeds with metadata.
Well, RSS can be seen in hindsight as being the First Wave of projecting a web presence beyond the content platform using standard markup formats. With this embedded metadata a publisher can expand their web footprint and allow users to link back to their content server.
Now, XMP with its potential for embedding metadata in rich media can be seen as a Second Wave. Media assets distributed over the network can now carry along their own metadata and identity which can be leveraged by third-party applications to provide interesting new functionalities and link-back capability. Again a projection of web presence.
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Marking up DOI

(Update – 2007.09.15: Clean forgot to add in the rdf: namespace to the examples for xmp:Identifier in this post. I’ve now added in that namespace to the markup fragments listed. Also added in a comment here which shows the example in RDF/XML for those who may prefer that over RDF/N3.)
So, as a preliminary to reviewing how a fuller metadata description of a CrossRef resource may best be fitted into an XMP packet for embedding into a PDF, let’s just consider how a DOI can be embedded into XMP. And since it’s so much clearer to read let’s just conduct this analysis using RDF/N3. (Life is too short to be spent reading RDF/XML or C++ code. :~)
(And further to Chris Shillum’s comment here on my earlier post Metadata in PDF: 2. Use Cases where he notes that Elsevier are looking to upgrade their markup of DOI in PDF to use XMP, I’m really hoping that Elsevier may have something to bring to the party and share with us. A consensus rendering of DOI within XMP is going to be of benefit to all.)
(Continues.)

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