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Emboldened by my own researches, by the recent handle plugin announcement from CNRI (on which, more in a follow-on post), and by Alexander Griekspoor’s comment to my earlier post, I thought I’d write a more extensive piece about embedding metadata in PDF with a view to the following:

• Discover what other publishers are currently doing
• Stimulate discussions between content providers and/or consumers
• Lay groundwork for a Crossref best practice guidelines

Why should Crossref be interested? Well, at minimum to embed the DOI along with the digital asset would seem to be inherently “a good thing”. (And, in fact, this is precisely the approach that CNRI have taken for their plugin demos. I’ll look later at what they actually did and consider whether that is a model that Crossref publishers might usefully follow.)

Well, this is likely to be a fairly brief post as I’m not aware of many use cases of metadata in PDFs from scholarly publishers. Certainly, I can say for Nature that we haven’t done much in this direction yet although are now beginning to look into this.

I’ll discuss a couple cases found in the wild but invite comment as to others’ practices. Let me start though with the CNRI handle plugin demo for Acrobat which I blogged here.

Just announced on the handle-info list is a new plugin from CNRI for Acrobat Reader - see here. The announcement says:

_“It is intended to demonstrate the utility of embedding a identifying

handle in a PDF document.

…

A set of demonstration documents, each with an embedded identifying

handle, is packaged with the plug-in to show potential uses. To make

productive use of this technology, a given industry or community of

users would have to agree on one or more specific applications and

Well, it all went very quiet for a while but glad to see that the URI Template Internet-Draft has just been republished:

_“A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts

directories.

Title : URI Template

Author(s) : J. Gregorio, et al.

Filename : draft-gregorio-uritemplate-01.txt

Pages : 9

Date : 2007-7-23

URI Templates are strings that can be transformed into URIs after

embedded variables are substituted. This document defines the

syntax and processing of URI Templates.

With these words:

_“There was quite some interest in Linked Data at this year’s World Wide

Web Conference (WWW2007). Therefore, Richard Cyganiak, Tom Heath and I

decided to write a tutorial about how to publish Linked Data on the

Web, so that interested people can find all relevant information, best

practices and references in a single place.”_

Chris Bizer announces this draft How to Publish Linked Data on the Web. It’s a bright and breezy tutorial and useful (to me, anyway) for disclosing a couple of links:

Seems that there’s life in the old dog yet. :~) See this post about PURL from Thom Hickey, OCLC, This extract:

OCLC has contracted with Zepheira to reimplement the PURL code which has become a bit out of date over the years. The new code will be in written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Just posted on Nascent a brief account of a presentation I gave recently on OTMI at BioNLP 2007. The post lists some of the feedback I received. We are very interested to get further comments so do feel free to contribute comments either directly to the post, privately to otmi@nature.com, or publicly to otmi-discuss@crossref.org. And then there’s always the OTMI wiki available for comment at http://opentextmining.org/.

It is important to note that OTMI is not a universal panacea but rather an attempt at bridging the gap between publisher and researcher. We are attempting to provide a framework to enable scholarly publishers to disclose full text for machine processing purposes without compromising their normal publishing obligations.

Nice entry article on PRISM here by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM’s DeveloperWorks.

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD’s head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick.

Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organizations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with “leave behinds”- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works. While researchers might prefer electronic versions of the publications for their day-to-day work, print versions of the same publications seemed to continue to play a critical role as an “awareness tool.” I know that, for this very reason, several NGO/IGOs that I’ve spoken to have despaired of ever ramping down their print operations.

OASIS has just announced a technical committee for standardising search services. This from the Call for Participation:

_

b. Purpose

To define Search and Retrieval Web Services, combining various current and

ongoing web service activities.

Within recent years there has been a growth in activity in the development of

web service definitions for search and retrieval applications. These include

SRU, a web service based in part on the NISO/ISO Search and Retrieval standards;