Blog

The new PRISM spec (v. 2.0) was published this week, see the press release. (Downloads are available here.) This is a significant development as there is support for XMP profiles, to complement the existing XML and RDF/XML profiles. And, as PRISM is one of the major vocabularies being used by publishers, I would urge you all to go take a look at it and to consider upgrading your applications to using it.

OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.

And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.

Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.

This message posted out yesterday on the dc-general list (with following extract) may be of interest: _“Public Comment on encoding specifications for Dublin Core metadata in HTML and XHTML 2007-11-05, Public Comment is being held from 5 November through 3 December 2007 on the DCMI Proposed Recommendation, “Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements” «http://dublincore.org/documents/2007/11/05/dc-html/» by Pete Johnston and Andy Powell. Interested members of the public are invited to post comments to the DC-ARCHITECTURE mailing list «http://www.

Bruce D’Arcus left a comment here in which he linked to post of his: “OpenDocument’s New Metadata System“. Not everybody reads comments so I’m repeating it here. His post is worth reading on two counts: He talks about the new metadata functionality for OpenDocument 1.2 which uses generic RDF. As he says: > _“Unlike Microsoft’s custom schema support, we provide this through the standard model of RDF. What this means is that implementors can provide a generic metadata API in their applications, based on an open standard, most likely just using off-the-shelf code libraries.

This This was just sent out to the DC-GENERAL mailing list about the new DCMI Community for Scholarly Communications. As Julie Allinson says: “The aim of the group is to provide a central place for individuals and organisations to exchange information, knowledge and general discussion on issues relating to using Dublin Core for describing items of ‘scholarly communications’, be they research papers, conference presentations, images, data objects. With digital repositories of scholarly materials increasingly being established across the world, this group would like to offer a home for exploring the metadata issues faced.

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.

Public comment period on the PRISM 2.0 draft ends Saturday (Sept. 15) ahead of next week’s WG meeting to review feedback and finalize the spec. (I put in some comments about XMP already. Hope they got that.)

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.

(Continues.)

Boy, was I ever so wrong! Contrary to what I said in yesterday’s post, the new PRISM 2.0 spec does support XMP value type mappings for its terms. See the table below which lists the PRISM basic vocabulary terms and the XMP value types.

Many thanks to Dianne Kennedy and the rest of the PRISM Working Group for having added this support to PRISM 2.0.

<span >(<b>Update - 2007.08.28:</b> I inadvertently missed out the term names in the last example of XMP as RDF/N3 with QNames and have now added these in. Also - a biggie - I said that PRISM had no XMP schema defined. This is actually wrong and as I blogged <a href="/blog/stop-press/">here</a> today, the new PRISM 2.0 spec does indeed have a mapping of PRISM terms to XMP value types. Should actually have read the spec instead of just blogging about it earlier <a href="/blog/prism-2.0/">here</a>. :~)

<span >Having previously stooped to an extremely crass hack for pulling out a document information dictionary from PDFs (for which no apologies are sufficient but it does often work) I feel I should make some kind of amends and mention the wonderful <a href="http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/">ExifTool</a> by Phil Harvey for reading and writing metadata to media files. This is both a Perl library and command-line application (so it’s cross-platform - a Windows .exe and Mac OS .dmg are also provided.) Besides handling EXIF tags in image files this veritable swissknife of metadata inspectors can also read PDFs for the information dictionary and the document XMP packet. And moreover, intriguingly, can dump the raw (document) XMP packet.

<span >I’m still experimenting with it. There’s quite a number of features to explore. But some preliminary finds are listed below.