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Somebody is both reading (and recommending) this blog - see Lorcan’s post here. Just my opinion but would be really good to see more librarians following this in order to arrive at better consensus.

The RSC has gone live today with the results of Project Prospect, introducing semantic enrichment of journal articles across all our titles. I’m pretty sure we’re the first primary research publisher to do anything of this scope. We’re identifying chemical compounds and providing synonyms, InChIs (IUPAC’s Chemical Identifier), downloadable CML (Chemical Markup Language), SMILES strings and 2D images for these compounds. In terms of subject area we’re marking up terms from the IUPAC Gold Book, and also Open Biomedical Ontology terms from the Gene, Cell, and Sequence Ontologies.

A couple weeks back there was a meeting of the Open Archive Initiative‘s Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) Technical Committee hosted in the Butler Library at Columbia University, New York.

Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC blogs here on the report (PDF format) that was generated from that meeting. As does Pete Johnston of Eduserv here.

Adobe announces today the following: “SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 29, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).” The full press release is here. (Via Oleg Tkachenko’s Blog.)

Not to get too self-referential here, but it was very cool to see that Tony Hammond has managed to get Not to get too self-referential here, but it was very cool to see that Tony Hammond has managed to get This based on a podcast interview with Tony posted on January 26th.

Although most folks will already know about this it still seems significant enough to blog the arrival of XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2.0, and XPath 2.0. See the W3C Press Release.

Was rooting around for some information and stumbled across this page which may be of interest: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2006/08/namespaced-extensions-in-feeds.html Namespaced Extensions in Feeds Thursday, August 03, 2006 posted by Mihai Parparita “I wrote a small MapReduce program to go over our BigTable and get the top 50 namespaces based on the number of feeds that use them.” Seems quite an impressive percentage for PRISM.

First off, a Happy New Year to all! A post of mine to the OpenURL list may possibly be of interest. Following up the recent W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group) Finding on “The Use of Metadata in URIs” I pointed out that the TAG do not seem to be aware of OpenURL: which is both a standard prescription for including metadata in URI strings and a US information standard to boot.

Peter Suber reports on his Open Access News that Google is offering to digitize journal backfiles. The full text articles are available as images and for free hosted by Google. The deal is non-exclusive and publishers retain copyright (but many backfiles will be out of copyright) but Google will not supply the publisher with the electronic files - so non-exclusive means that the publisher or someone else could digitize the backfile too (but how to recover the costs when it’s all free in Google?

MIT’s Simile project has just released Exhibit, a ” lightweight structured data publishing framework.” Read that as “an easy-to-use mashup creation tool.” I have heard that Leigh has already started experimenting with it. I look forward to a writeup soon…