Category: Standards

DataCite supporting content negotiation

In April CrossRef launched content negotiation support for its DOIs. At the time I cheekily called-out DataCite to start supporting content negotiation as well.

Edward Zukowski (DataCite’s resident propellor-head) took up the challenge with gusto and, as of September 22nd DataCite has also been supporting content negotiation for its DOIs. This means that one million more DOIs are now linked-data friendly. Congratulations to Ed and the rest of the team at DataCite.

We hope this is a trend. Back in June Knowledge Exchange organized a seminar on Persistent Object Identifiers. One of the outcomes of the meeting was “Den Haag Manifesto” a document outlining five relatively simple steps that different persistent identifier systems could take in order to increase interoperability. Most of these steps involved adopting linked data principles including support for content negotiation. We look forward to hearing about other persistent identifiers adopting these principles over the next year.

Having said that, this time I will refrain from calling-out anybody specifically…

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Content Negotiation for CrossRef DOIs

So does anybody remember the posting DOIs and Linked Data: Some Concrete Proposals?

Well, we went with option “D.”

From now on, DOIs, expressed as HTTP URIs, can be used with content-negotiation.

Let’s get straight to the point. If you have curl installed, you can start playing with content-negotiation and CrossRef DOIs right away:

curl -D – -L -H   “Accept: application/rdf+xml” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784” 

curl -D – -L -H   “Accept: text/turtle” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784”

curl -D – -L -H   “Accept: application/atom+xml” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784”

Or if you are already using CrossRef’s “unixref” format:

curl -D – -L -H “Accept: application/unixref+xml” “http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784” 

This will work with over 46 million CrossRef DOIs as of today, but the beauty of the setup is that from now on, any DOI registration agency can enable content negotiation for their constituencies as well. DataCite– we’re looking at you 😉 .

It also means that, as registration agency members (CrossRef publishers, for instance) start providing more complete and richer representations of their content, we can simply redirect content-negotiated requests directly to them.

We expect that that this development will round-out CrossRef’s efforts to support standard APIs including OpenURL and OAI_PMH and we look forward to seeing DOIs increasingly used in linked data applications.

Finally, CrossRef would just like to thank the IDF and CNRI for their hard work on this as well as Tony Hammond and Leigh Dodds for their valuable advice and persistent goading.

Now What About XMP?

With PDF now passed over to ISO as keeper of the format (as blogged here on CrossTech), Kas Thomas (on CMS Watch’s TrendWatch) blogs here that Adobe should now do the right thing by XMP and look to hand that over too in order to establish it as a truly open standard. As he says:

“Let’s cut to the chase. If Adobe wants to demonstrate its commitment to openness, it should do for XMP what it has already done for PDF: Put it in the hands of a legitimate standards body. Right now it’s open in name only. “

And this:

“Adobe is pushing the XMP standard … at Adobe’s pace and in ways that benefit Adobe. (The parallels with PDF are numerous and obvious.) There are lingering technical issues waiting to be solved, however. Issues whose solutions shouldn’t have to be dependent on Adobe’s needs only.”

He’s absolutely bang on. With XMP on the threshold of finally shining through we really could do with Adobe cutting it loose. It’s time to leave home.

Word Add-in for Scholarly Authoring and Publishing

Last week Pablo Fernicola sent me email announcing that Microsoft have finally released a beta of their Word plugin for marking-up manuscripts with the NLM DTD. I say “finally” because we’ve know this was on the way and have been pretty excited to see it. We once even hoped that MS might be able to show the plug-in at the ALPSP session on the NLM DTD, but we couldn’t quite manage it.
The plugin is targeted at production/editorial staff, but, of course, it will be interesting to see if any of this work can be pushed back to the author. I won’t hold my breath on the latter score, but it will be fun to watch.
One thing I would note is that the NLM DTD can also be used in the humanities and social sciences, so, frankly, I think they should market it more broadly.
Anyway- the plugin can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.
And Pablo has setup a blog where testers can discuss the add-in.
And there is also an entry for the project on the Microsoft Research site (an interesting place to peruse, if you have a moment).
Congatulations to Pablo and his team.

Object Reuse and Exchange

On March 3rd the Open Archives Initiative held a roll out meeting of the first alpha release of the ORE specification (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/) . According to Herbert Van de Sompel a beta release is planned for late March / early April and a 1.0 release targeted for September. The presentations focused on the aggregation concepts behind ORE and described an ATOM based implementation. ORE is the second project from the OAI but unlike its sibling PMH it is not exclusively a repository technology. ORE provides machine readable manifests for related Web resources in any context. For instance, DOI landing pages (aka splash page) are human readable resources containing links to any number of resources related to the work identified by the DOI. An ORE instance for the DOI (called a Rem or resource map) would describe the same set of resources in a machine friendly format. A standardized form of redirection understood by the DOI proxy would yield the Rem instead of normal page (e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.5555/abcd?type=rem) which could be useful for crawlers.
A second roll out meeting is planned during the Sparc-08 workshops in early April.

STIX Fonts in Beta

Well, Howard already blogged on Nascent last week about the STIX fonts (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange) being launched and now freely available in beta. And today the STM Association also have blogged this milestone mark. So, just for the record, I’m noting here on CrossTech those links for easy retrieval. As Howard says:

“I recommend all publishers download the fonts from the STIX web site at www.stixfonts.org today.”

(And for those who want to see more of Howard, he can be found in interview here on the SIIA Executive FaceTime Webcast Series. 🙂

“Spinning Around”

There’s a great exposition of FRBR (the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records model “work -> expression -> manifestation -> item“) in this post from The FRBR Blog on De Revolutionibus as described in The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich. See post for the background and here (103 KB PNG) for a map of the FRBR relationships.
(Yes, and a twinkly star in the title too. ;~)

OpenDocument 1.1 is OASIS Standard

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.”