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Just posted on Nascent a brief account of a presentation I gave recently on OTMI at BioNLP 2007. The post lists some of the feedback I received. We are very interested to get further comments so do feel free to contribute comments either directly to the post, privately to otmi@nature.com, or publicly to otmi-discuss@crossref.org. And then there’s always the OTMI wiki available for comment at http://opentextmining.org/.

It is important to note that OTMI is not a universal panacea but rather an attempt at bridging the gap between publisher and researcher. We are attempting to provide a framework to enable scholarly publishers to disclose full text for machine processing purposes without compromising their normal publishing obligations.

Nice entry article on PRISM here by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM’s DeveloperWorks.

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD’s head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick.

Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organisations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with “leave behinds”- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works. While researchers might prefer electronic versions of the publications for their day-to-day work, print versions of the same publications seemed to continue to play a critical role as an “awareness tool.” I know that, for this very reason, several NGO/IGOs that I’ve spoken to have despaired of ever ramping down their print operations.

OASIS has just announced a technical committee for standardising search services. This from the Call for Participation:

_

b. Purpose

To define Search and Retrieval Web Services, combining various current and

ongoing web service activities.

Within recent years there has been a growth in activity in the development of

web service definitions for search and retrieval applications. These include

SRU, a web service based in part on the NISO/ISO Search and Retrieval standards;

Please see the details of the IDF Annual Meeting and a related Handle System Workshop in Washington, DC on June 21 which may be of interest - http://www.crossref.org.ezproxy.galter.northwestern.edu/crweblog/2007/06/international_doi_foundation_a.html

Last week we had a second face-to-face of the OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange) Technical Committee in New York, the meeting being hosted courtesy of Google. (Hence the snap here taken from the terrace of Google’s canteen with its gorgeous view of midtown Manhattan. And the food’s not too shabby either. ;~)

The main input to the meeting was this discussion document: Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective. This document we feel has now reached a level of maturity that we wanted to share with a wider audience. We invite feedback either directly at ore@openarchives.org or indirectly via yours truly.

We updated our Project Prospect articles today to release v1.1, with a pile of look & feel improvements to the HTML views and links. The most interesting technical addition is the launch of our enhanced RSS feeds, where we have updated our existing feeds for enhanced articles. These now include ontology terms and primary compounds both visually (as text terms and 2D images) and within the RDF - using the OBO in OWL representation and the info:inchi specification mentioned here by Tony only a few weeks ago.

The enhanced entries will soon become more common as we concentrate our enhancements on our Advance Articles, but the current example below from our Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences feed is lovely. RDF code after the jump - just as beautiful to the parents…

I posted here about an initial meeting of the OAI-ORE Technical WG back in January. ORE is the “Object Reuse and Exchange” initiative which is aiming to provide a formalism for describing scholarly works as complete units (or packages) of information on the Web using resource maps which would be available from public access points. From a DOI perspective this work is intimately connected with multiple resolution. For further updates on this work, see here for a presentation by Herbert Van de Sompel on OAI-ORE at the OAI5 Workshop (5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication) held a couple weeks back at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

Was just reminded (thanks, Tim) of the possibility of using a special tag in bookmarking services to tag links to documents of interest to a given community. I think this is a fairly well-established practice. Note that e.g. the OAI-ORE project is using Connotea to bookmark pages of interest and tagging them “oaiore” which can then be easily retrieved using the link http://web.archive.org/web/20160402182544/http://www.connotea.org/.

I would suggest that Crossref members might like to consider using the tag “crosstech” in bookmarking pages about publishing technology, so that the following links might be used to retrieve documents of interest to this readership:

This D-Lib paper by Altman and King looks interesting: “A Proposed Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data”. (And thanks to Herbert Van de Sompel for drawing attention to the paper.) Gist of it (Sect. 3) is

_“We propose that citations to numerical data include, at a minimum, six required components. The first three components are traditional, directly paralleling print documents. … Thus, we add three components using modern technology, each of which is designed to persist even when the technology changes: a unique global identifier, a universal numeric fingerprint, and a bridge service. They are also designed to take advantage of the digital form of quantitative data.

An example of a complete citation, using this minimal version of the proposed standards, is as follows:

**Micah Altman; Karin MacDonald; Michael P. McDonald, 2005, “Computer Use in Redistricting”,

hdl:1902.1/AMXGCNKCLU UNF:3:J0PkMygLPfIyT1E/8xO/EA==

http://id.thedata.org/hdl%3A1902.1%2FAMXGCNKCLU

“_