Blog

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 InChI (International Chemical Identifier from IUPAC) has been blogged earlier here. RSC have especially taken this on board in their Project Prospect and now routinely syndicate InChI identifiers in their RSS feeds as blogged here. As reported variously last month (see here for one such review) IUPAC have now released a new (1.02beta) version of their software which allows hashed versions (fixed length 25-character) of the InChI, so-called InChIKey’s, to be generated which are much more search engine friendly.

Oh dear. Yesterday’s post “Using ISO URNs” was way off the mark. I don’t know. I thought that walk after lunch had cleared my mind. But apparently not. I guess I was fixing on eyeballing the result in RDF/N3 rather than the logic to arrive at that result.

(Continues.)

(Update - 2007.10.02: Just realized that there were some serious flaws in the post below regarding publication and form of namespace URIs which I’ve now addressed in a subsequent post here.)

By way of experimenting with a use case for ISO URNs, below is a listing of the document metadata for an arbitrary PDF. (You can judge for yourselves whether the metadata disclosed here is sufficient to describe the document.) Here, the metadata is taken from the information dictionary and from the document metadata stream (XMP packet).

The metadata is expressed in RDF/N3. That may not be a surprise for the XMP packet which is serialized in RDF/XML, as it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to render it as RDF/N3 with properties taken from schema whose namespaces are identified by URI. What may be more unusual is to see the document information dictionary metadata (the “normal” metadata in a PDF) rendered as RDF/N3 since the information dictionary is not nodelled on RDF, not expressed in XML, and not namespaced. Here, in addition to the trusty HTTP URI scheme, I’ve made use of two particular URI schemes: “iso:” URN namespaces, and “data:” URIs.

(Continues.)

ISO has registered with the IANA a URN namespace identifier (“iso:”) for ISO persistent resources. From the Internet-Draft: “This URN NID is intended for use for the identification of persistent resources published by the ISO standards body (including documents, document metadata, extracted resources such as standard schemata and standard value sets, and other resources).” The toplevel grammar rules (ABNF) give some indication of scope: NSS = std-nss std-nss = “std:” docidentifier *supplement *docelement [addition]

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

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.