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From the OASIS Press Release: “Boston, MA, USA; 13 February 2007 — OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved version 1.1 of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification.”

February 5, 2007, Washington DC Crossref invited a number of people to attend an information gathering session on the topic of Author IDs. The purpose of the meeting was to determine: About whether there is an industry need for a central or federated contributor id registry; whether Crossref should have a role in creating such a registry; how to proceed in a way that builds upon existing systems and standards.

Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Identity Czar and member of the Identity Gang, comments on Microsoft’s announcement that they will support OpenID. Another sign that federated identity schemes are gaining traction and OpenID is likely to emerge as a standard the publishers are going to want to grapple with soon. This follows Doc Searl’s comments on the notion of “Creator Relationship Management” where he speculates that the techniques being used in federated identity schemes and the Creative Commons can be combined to create a new “silo-free” value chain amongst creators, producers and distributors.

Niall Kennedy has a post about the newly released Yahoo! Pipes. As he says: “Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr.” He also warns about possible implications for web publishers: “Yahoo! Pipes makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content.

Sam Ruby responds to Brian Kelly’s post about the RSS Validator and its treatment of RSS 1.0, or rather, RSS 1.0 modules. As Ruby notes: “There is no question that RSS 1.0 is widely deployed. RSS 1.0 has a minimal core. The validation for that core is pretty solid.” Not sure if I’d seen that RSS comparison table before, but it is reassuring. (Oh, and see the really simple case off to the right.

Nelson Minar has a short post on Google’s Search History ‘feature’ and how it can be used to enhance your search experience. I guess that should be SearchULike.

Simon Willison has a great piece here about disambiguating URLs. Best practice on creating and publishing URLs is obviously something of interest to any publisher. See this excerpt from Simon’s post: _“Here’s a random example, plucked from today’s del.icio.us popular. convinceme.net is a new online debating site (tag clouds, gradient fills, rounded corners). It’s listed in del.icio.us a total of four times! https://web.archive.org/web/20070203050251/http://www.convinceme.net/ has 36 saves https://web.archive.org/web/20070202182238/http://www.convinceme.net/index.php has 148 saves

Due to spam the comments and trackbacks were turned off on the blog since last week. Comments can be moderated so they have now been turned back on. Glad to see postings picking up.

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.