Science Library Pad

Every Blog Its Reader

I did a keynote in 2008 where I said "Every web resource its machine reader", reinterpreting Ranganathan for the computer age.

I want to look back on how we almost built an ecosystem of information for human and machine readers, and then it fell apart.

Below, I will see if I can tell the tale of the decline of the blogosphere and end up with thoughts about the Antikythera Mechanism and scholarly communication.

In 2007, Darren Barefoot wrote in The Tyee about an era that just 9 years later, is totally gone.

It begins:

I subscribe to the RSS feeds for about 175 blogs.

Later down, it says

Technology reporter and uber-geek Tod Maffin runs Inside the CBC. It's kind of an industry blog, in that it covers the world of Canadian public broadcasting...

The Rise and Fall of Inside the CBC

Let's have a look at Inside the CBC now, in 2016

It is definitely not by Tod Maffin, nor does it cover the world of Canadian public broadcasting.  It's more or less what we would call this year fake news.  More specifically, it's a kind of human content written for robots, but not at all in the way I intended.  It's most likely, given the jumble of topics (neopets, skates, weddings in Gatlinburg), a search-keyword-driven tasking of quick content creation.  "Neopets searches are peaking, quick, write something about neopets!"

Which is to say, the ecosystem of interlinking conversations that Barefoot describes in 2007 is quite gone.  It's clear there's some complicated history behind its demise, but for simplicity's sake, here's what we can find from the Internet Archive: by February 1, 2011 the blog has a posting from January 10, 2011 at 8:58 pm.  And that blog post remains, frozen in time at the top of the page until at least January 28, 2013.  By June 21, 2014 the page reads simply "The domain insidethecbc.com is no longer parked by GoDaddy." By December 21, 2014 it has become, rather unexpectedly, a blog in German: "Wir haben ein großes Forschungszentrum mit über 100 Mitarbeitern und Niederlassungen in Übersee und Asien." / "We have a large research center with over 100 employees and branches in overseas and Asia." By September 9, 2016 it has transformed again, writing in (sort-of) English about "The advantage of getting nucific bio x4 coupon codes" and by October 22, 2016 it has settled into its current format.

The long and short of this is firstly, this is a disaster for a "many small pieces, loosely joined" ecosystem, and secondly, without Internet Archive, or even if the current owner of Inside the CBC changed their robots.txt, all of the original site would be gone.

The Other Shoe Drops

The story of Inside the CBC turned out to be more complicated than I thought.  Is it illustrative of the decline of the blogosphere?  Well just seven years after his article in The Tyee, Barefoot is blogging "In 2014, what is my blog for?"

Whither Alexandria?

What has happened?  Well, basically, it turned out that this world of interlinking blogs and feed reading at best fell apart, at worst was deliberately dismantled.

I realise the latter is a more compelling story than the former, but it's a combination of factors.  In the In Our Time episode The Library of Alexandria, we may look to hear again the story of how the library burned, but the conclusion is actually that it really just faded away.  With the rise of the Christian Roman Empire, the old knowledge and the old conversations, the dialogues between the books, just weren't of as much interest any more.

But one of the reasons we still have this discussion about the destruction of the library is because of the reality of so much loss of information.

In Reality Is Not What It Seems (BBC Radio 4 adaptation episode 1, Fiat Lux), Carlo Rovelli tells the history of physics in the conventional way that most western European scientists do, beginning with the Greeks.  In particular, he speaks of Democritus, and of his dismay at the loss of Democritus' original writings.  "We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas.  I often think that the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of Classical civilization."

SIDEBAR

This formulation of the history of physics is so common that The Big Bang Theory parodies it in episode 3x10, where in order to teach Penny about Leonard's current research, Sheldon will only present the topic by starting with "It is there in Ancient Greece that our story begins..."

The episode is entitled The Gorilla Experiment, it aired in 2009.  It's not to be confused with 7x23 The Gorilla Dissolution which aired in 2014.

ENDSIDEBAR

Consider that while Rovelli is lamenting the loss of writings from 2400 years ago, we are not even doing a good job of maintaining writings from 9 years ago.  In fact, some Internet content is only now available through quotations and references made by other bloggers.

(And its worth noting that when you read this, you probably won't be able to listen to Fiat Lux, because the BBC is only making it available online for another 25 days.  And depending on your local copyright laws, you may not be able to legally view a clip from The Big Bang Theory without having purchased access to the episode.)

Thanks Google and Facebook

It didn't help that Google closed Google Reader.  It's a minor miracle that Google FeedBurner still exists.  The demise of (Facebook-owned) FriendFeed removed a conversation option from the web.  Overall, the ecosystem has shifted to closed commercial services and to search results driving traffic to commercial sites.

Whither Quebec?

If you want an idea of how fragile this ecosystem is, turn to the Elections Quebec page on Electronic Voting.  It used to include four press releases.  These press releases have now been "archived", which in this particular case means removed entirely from the web.  This is what the page looked like September 16, 2016 with the press releases (page from the Internet Archive)

and this is what it looks like now, with no indication the press releases ever were there.

There is nothing insidious about this, this is just standard web procedure - the press releases are from 2006, probably they were rarely accessed, so you run your ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) analysis and conclude that ten years online was enough, it's time for the press releases to go.

But once they go, they're gone.  Are they in the Library and Archives Canada web archive?  Are they in the BAnQ web archive?  It's hard to know.  Neither provides a public search interface that can uncover the Elections Quebec pages.  Without coverage in the national archive, and in the provincial archive, and in the Internet Archive, content that is removed from the web is just simply gone forever.

So this is where we find ourselves.  We have a single main service, the Internet Archive, that depends on private funding and that is attempting to make a backup of itself in Canada.  Coverage from other web archives is unclear and may be nonexistent.  Every day, as websites are reorganised, or content is deliberately removed for various reasons, or websites are simply neglected until the domain expires, our online Library of Alexandria fades.  Not in some blaze of destruction, but more from lost interest, the same as the original.

You might think this is not a problem, because we can get the press releases from the Internet Archive, but it never indexed them.  So for all intents and purposes they are gone now.

SIDEBAR

Because I happened to be paying particular attention to Canadian electronic voting information over the past few months, I was able to recover three of the press releases using a combination of Pinboard, Google and Bing caches.  The search engine caches would have been replaced very quickly, so it's only good fortune that I was able to grab the content before it was lost.

I have also become a bit obsessed about adding manually adding pages to the Archive, which you can do by going to https://web.archive.org/ and pasting the URL into the box under Save Page Now and clicking Save Page.

ENDSIDEBAR

The Loss of the Immune System

Blogging, with its interlinked web of discussions, was a kind of web immune system.  It wasn't perfect, but it was a way to have a conversation, and a way to provide signals to Google about what was and wasn't important, and to some extent, about what was and wasn't true.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get discovered through the network of blogs, to get added to feed readers, to become a new information source.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get good Google search ranking, to be discovered through search and thus be an important contributor to the conversation.

This is all basically gone.  Many of the blogs are gone, the blog discovery ecosystem is gone, the feed readers are gone, and Google search rank is very hard to get.

The Post- Era

Here's a quote

For some, this past election year was about the slow death of the current political system.

Can you place it in time? It's from... 1997.  Jon Katz wrote enthusiastically in Wired about how online conversations were going to transform political discourse.

On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who – in jarring contrast to the offline world – line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.

...

I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when people were suddenly able to talk directly to one another, rather than through journalists, politicians, or ideological mercenaries.

I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation – the Digital Nation – and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy.

Jon Katz, in 2016, now writes books about dogs.

So how did the hopes for online conversation and engagement go to the dogs?  How did we get from a postpolitical philosophy to post-truth as the word of the year?

Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2016

2007 may have been the tipping point.  The iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

Sitting in front of a desktop, you have a keyboard and a mouse and a screen.  This drives a certain kind of text-based, highlight-and-insert content creation.

Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are terrible at long text and inserting content.  They are great for creating photos and videos.  And so now that's the world we have, the photo and video world. 

All of the signals that we needed to rank and sort and link and discover are gone.  Now it's just bam! image, bam! video.  No context, no links, just endless streams of content.  The web now is, in short, television rather than a library.  And the consequences of this are huge.

In MIT Technology Review, Hossein Derakhshan writes

Before I went to prison [in 2008], I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.

...

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy.

In other words, we used to be able to use the web to have a conversation, and now we are basically using the web to amuse ourselves to death.

The blog ecosystem helped to create a kind of web immune system, an immune system that Google could use to surface healthy information.  With that gone, it's no wonder that false news can spread easily.

Finding the Antikythera Mechanism

Science depends on a web of citations, a web of knowledge.  Without a web of knowledge on the actual web, how can we hope to make discoveries and determine what is of interest.  How can we challenge information when we're in our filter bubbles, Facebooking to one another, off of the public web?

In 2008 (remember my talk from 2008? it's way back at the start of this blog post), I thought we might be able to meld human and machine understandings in order to advance the conversation.  I promoted the idea of better formatting information for machine processing, in order that we could benefit from machine-aided search and discovery.

I deliberately chose not to emphasize automatically-generated information.  Depending on the era, I've heard that the Semantic Web would solve discovery, or that OAI-ORE was going to link everything together, or now that Artificial Intelligence and Big Data will discover all connections automatically.

Would that this were so.

In Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Adrienne LaFrance writes

What if other objects like the Antikythera Mechanism have already been discovered and forgotten? There may well be documented evidence of such finds somewhere in the world, in the vast archives of human research, scholarly and otherwise, but simply no way to search for them. Until now.

This is a compelling vision of knowledge that we don't even know that we have, that could be unearthed if we just digitized and translated everything, and then sent our AIs digging for connections.  Maybe Democritus is out there, in some copy of a copy of an Arabic translation.  Maybe this whole lost world of complex mechanical devices is out there on paper somewhere, just waiting to be found.

But there is a pretty harsh collision between that vision and the reality of the web we've created.

We were on a path that might have enabled this scholarly discovery, although probably with a lot more human intervention than techno-utopians would like.  But now we can't even find things from a few years ago.  We were assembling the book-to-book conversations of a new Library of Alexandria, and now we're scraping down the pages like in the Archimedes Palimpsest

This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204.^[7] There, in 1229, the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book.

But we're doing far far worse than writing over thousand-year-old knowledge.  We're erasing completely information from last year, with no xray to recover it.

Which is to say, as much as I love the vision of recovering the lost history of the Antikythera Mechanism, I'm more worried we won't even have a history of last year.

Remaking the Web We Made

This is the web now

The Web of Desperate Popup Intrusion.

That used to be the web of users deciding to subscribe to feeds, instead of being badgered to sign up to email newsletters, or to view ads, or to pay up immediately.

So let's try to unwind some of our mistakes.  Rather than some AI utopia that will unearth lost connections from millenia past, let's deliberately build a human reality of intentional reconnection.  Some suggestions:

• more slow, less fast
• more longform, less shortform
• more blogging, less Twitter
• open your feedreader, not your email
• less reaction to images, more thought about text
• get more sleep
• read more books
• put the smartphone down
• more services that let us pay for them, less ad-supported data-mining intrusion
• more public broadcaster support
• systematic public investment in web archiving
• less closed conversation, more open public conversation
• a more realistic blend of human-created metadata and machine analysis

I will readily admit that I got pulled away into the quick rewards of Twitter from the slow work of blogging.  And it's become a self-reinforcing system.  As blogging and feedreading faded, blog hits and links and comments faded.  Blog rank in Google faded.  Wearing another hat, I wrote 595 blog posts about online voting from 2004 to 2016.  All that work, and (for the particular Google results I see today on this computer), the blog shows up once on page 5 of results for "online voting" canada.  It's hard to maintain one's enthusiasm for 5th page ranking.  It's hard to maintain one's blogging for two web hits a day.

But then I remember I originally started blogging just for myself.  I didn't anticipate my blog would grow and connect in the way that it did for a while.  So I am going to try to get back to blogging, because everywhere I go now, even for the few seconds of an elevator ride, I see people lost in their smartphone screens.  I don't see how we can continue on losing ourselves in those little personalized screens.

ORCID: a unifying identifier for authors

The ORCID project has launched their service.  I had thought it would only be for participating organisations but you can register as an individual.

I registered and was able to pull in citations from Scopus and then from CrossRef.

To link to a personal page it's just http://orcid.org/[ORCID] e.g. mine is

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4744-6336

You can also submit support tickets to http://support.orcid.org/ (which has a separate account from the main ORCID site).

It's v1.0 so there are lots of bugs.

You can follow @orcid_org and @researchremix for info about the system.

There's an API, see e.g. the documentation at http://support.orcid.org/knowledgebase/topics/19247-rest-api

It's important to understand what this is and what it is not.

It is a way to assign a globally-unique ID to every author, and to link that ID to other service-specific IDs (such as Scopus ID).  It is not a social network for scientists.

It is also a way to link that unique ID to research objects.  ORCID says it enables authors to

uniquely attach your identity to research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles, media stories, citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks

So ORCID is essentially a key piece of scholarly infrastructure.  Infrastructure like this can be hard to build because usually people are interested in the services they can build on top of infrastructure, not in the underlying support pieces themselves.

Experiments in Free Citation Management Online

The Citation and Author services that Google and Microsoft provide shouldn't be considered in the same space as ORCID.  They're more experiments in what can be done with the available data.  They don't have the same design requirements.

Google Scholar has a system that is mainly about citations and author connections, my profile is

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=t3YXGOEAAAAJ

Microsoft Academic also has an authors system, although it auto-creates pages (Google gives you more control over creating and populating your profile).  My MS profile has an assortment of errors.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/18113495/richard-akerman

As you might expect you need to use a Google account to manage your Scholar profile and a Microsoft Live ID to manage your Academic profile. 

The MS site also lives at http://journalogy.com/

I Claim

With all of them the "claim" process is going to be a bit of a challenge.  How much infrastructure do we have to verify that the person who says they have the credentials to modify an author account actually is that specific author?  What happens when you use e.g. an institutional email and you're no longer at that institution?  It will be interesting to see how this issue is managed.

Previously:
July 21, 2011  Google Scholar adds personal profiles displaying citations

 

Google Scholar adds personal profiles displaying citations

I guess the "make everything social" decree went out to Google Scholar as well.

There is now essentially a scholarly social network built in - individual user profiles displaying citations, links to colleagues.

Today we’re introducing Google Scholar Citations: a simple way for you to compute your citation metrics and track them over time.

...

You can enable automatic addition of your newly published articles to your profile. This would instruct the Google Scholar indexing system to update your profile as it discovers new articles that are likely yours. And you can, of course, manually update your profile by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.

You can also create a public profile with your articles and citation metrics

Google Scholar Blog - Google Scholar Citations - July 20, 2011

There's more information at http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html

Citations is in limited release, you have to sign up on a waiting list, usual procedures.

Here is the profile for Anurag Acharya: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nGEWZbkAAAAJ&hl=en

UPDATE 2013-11-21: Google Scholar has added a personal library feature.  ENDUPDATE

Previously:
November 20, 2004  Google Scholar  (my first mention of Scholar, shortly after it was launched)

Knol - thinking about authority

A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.

http://knol.google.com/

So by its own assertion, right at the top of the Knol page, Knols are about authority.
But they've made an interesting choice, which is to attach authority to authorship.
This is a model that we understand quite well, since it is the classic Britannica model.

So if you want to organise knowledge this way, it's quite easy, you get Learned Persons to write articles in their areas of expertise.  There are, however, multiple problems with this approach:

1. You actually have to get them to write.
2. You get a tremendous management problem as you try to scale out from a handful of articles to millions.
3. Just because someone is very learned in one area (e.g. Ph.D. in Physics with accompanying publications) doesn't necessarily mean that he or she has any expertise whatsoever in another area (e.g. climate change).
4. We only have "authority structures" for a small number of areas (related to issue #2 above).  You can probably find an authority in Evidence-Based Medicine (and indeed the Knol on that topic is quite learned).  But who is the authority on say... Gnolls, obscure mythical creatures?

So Google has created an odd hybrid system.  It's seeded with some articles mostly from medicine, but it's open to anyone.  A system that claims authoritativeness, with no mechanism to verify this, other than a weak name-verification procedure.

Uniquely identifying authors (and producing a global authority file, to use library terminology) would have been an interesting problem to address, but it is not dealt with.

The actual problem they appear to be trying to address is not one of authority, but of certification.  They're focusing on credentials, when the focus should be on proof.  As best I can deduce the argument, it goes something like "on Wikipedia anyone can author, anyone can make changes, and anyone can challenge anything".

Part of this is simply a cultural issue.  There is a culture war in America, and partisans on either side use sophistry to try to prop up their arguments, leading to endless rounds of dispute.  However Wikipedia has at its core the most elegant of mechanisms to address this:

{fact}

This tiny bit of wikicode is so foundational that I think it perhaps gets overlooked.  What it does is put in a link that says "citation needed".  This little piece takes Wikipedia from an open brawl, to one of the most powerful engines promoting scientific thinking in our time.  It says simply: "I don't care who you are, demonstrate with evidence that your statement is true".

To retreat from this is to retreat from reasoned discourse.

Why?  Well, I have to turn to Wikipedia

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Clarke's First Law - Wikipedia: Clarke's three laws

(You can also amuse yourself with Wikiquote: Incorrect predictions.)

To put it another way: authority is a weak predictor of truth.  Only evidence is a strong indication of truth.

This brings me to the another flaw in Knol - the ability to cite evidence is laughably weak.
The Knol idea of a reference is... a URL with a title, that is autonumbered.  That's it.
Let's compare: Wikipedia has an entire page on Citing sources, and an entire page of metadata-rich Citation templates.  Knol has

Search Results:
No results found for citation

or more generously, it has a help page on Adding References with the example

Are you kidding me?  It's 2008 and scientists are enthusiastic about creating a semantically-rich web, and you provide a box to construct a numbered A HREF?  No DOI input?  No bibliographic import or awareness of bibliographic metadata whatsoever?  Where's the authority in that?

Even worse, rather than the single-article Wikipedia model, where everyone must work towards a consensus, Knol encourages a marketplace of competing isolated viewpoints:

What if someone else has already written an article on that subject?

No problem, you can still write your own article. In fact, the Knol project is a forum for encouraging individual voices and perspectives on topics. As mentioned, no one else can edit your knol (unless you permit it) or mandate how you write about a topic. If you do a search on a topic, you may very well see more than one knol in the search results. Of course, people are free to disagree with you, to write their own knols, to post comments and ratings.

http://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help

Great, so all the people with over a century of evidence supporting the benefits of immunization can balkanize off in their own Knol, while the nutjobs who think immunization is some government conspiracy can have their Knol, and each community can rate their respective Knol highly.  How does that help anything?

The problem is that Knol has focused on authorship, and not certification.  What demonstrates the law of gravity is true is a preponderance of evidence, not some sort of individual gravitas.

Now there certainly is something in ranking and commenting that helps us to get at certification, but the mechanism provided is simply too weak.  Certification is some combination of general review, authoritative review, ranking, and ranking of the rankers.  Certification must work on a consensus item.  You may think this is abstract, but for example in astrophysics one camp of researchers put the Hubble Constant at a much higher value than other group, and each research "camp" would consistently release research supporting their number.  I can tell you this in part, not because I have a perfect memory, but because I can extract

The value of the Hubble constant was the topic of a long and rather bitter controversy between Gérard de Vaucouleurs who claimed the value was around 100 and Allan Sandage who claimed the value was near 50.

from the Disputes over Hubble's constant section of the consensus article on Wikipedia about Hubble's Law

Now tell me, what do you think you would get if instead, each of these groups had created its own Knol about the Hubble constant?

SIDEBAR: Problems with Knol

• There is no way to permalink to a comment.  If you have lots of comments, you will have to page through them to find what you want.
• There is no way to see all the comments that a person has posted, that is, to get from their profile to their comments.
• Despite it supposedly being all about you, the author, there is no way to get any page hit stats (which would tell you where you were being linked from, and what search terms were reaching your page, amongst other things).

SIDEBAR 2: Amusing Knol front page

"Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F" line on main Knol page (i.e. telling you to use your browser's in-page search to find something... which I should mention is actually Splat-F on the Mac)

END SIDEBARS

To wrap up this discussion, let's talk about Gnolls.  (I have to admit, much of this posting was prompted simply because I was amused by the idea of doing a Knol about Gnolls.)

Search Results:
No results found for gnoll

http://knol.google.com/k/knol/system/knol/pages/Search?q=gnoll&restrict=general#

So, who is the authority about Gnolls?  Are we to search the publications of the Academy of Gnoll Studies?  And if you are the authority about Gnolls, what benefit do you get from putting up a Knol, rather than demonstrating your knowledge through blog and forum postings on sites that you control (or that are part of your community of interest), or perhaps writing a book?

Similarly, if you know some tidbit about Gnolls, where are you going to contribute that sentence?  Do you want to put it in front of millions of Wikipedia eyeballs, or do you want to attach it to a Knol that you hope will get rated and linked and searched enough that it will rise above the other Gnoll Knols so that people actually see it?

Whither the Gnoll, that sadly neglected second-tier monster, lost in the shadows of its better known competitors, Goblins and Gnomes.  A pretty obscure topic, one would think.  Yet there is the Wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnoll

with paragraph after paragraph of information about Gnolls from the historical to the modern, from Lord Dunsany to World of Warcraft.  (If you want further reading, Dunsany's story is online: How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles.) 

So this is how Wikipedia beats Knols:

• it provides a platform to develop consensus in a single article about a topic, with a focus on citations
• its citations have rich metadata
• it provides a platform to share "microknowledge"
• it provides a big enough Crowd so that you get some Wisdom
• it encourages cross-linking of topics, so you begin to see a web of knowledge

In this case, I think the Wisdom of the Crowd is going to beat the authority of the individual.

I hope that Google will learn from this and refocus to more interesting areas including:

• author identification, impact, reputation, and peer networks - and how to make those all open and portable
• much more powerful systems for ranking, rating, and discussing any web page (including a Knol) - as well as ranking the rankers
• knowledge certification
• creation of semantically-rich knowledge bases

Previously/Related:

July 23, 2008  probably the 1000th Knol post you've seen today

June 22, 2007  Community peer review in Wiki environment - Christine Chichester - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

June 22, 2007  my presentation at ICSTI 2007 Nancy - Web tools for peer reviewers and everyone.  Also see video of this presentation (RealVideo).

In general all of the ICSTI 2007 presentations.

March 02, 2007  soft peer review

June 21, 2006  my article on peer review for Nature

your unique author-ity

There are many ways to generate lists of one's publications, Martin Fenner lists a few in

An easy online list of all your publications

Mention is made of both the Scopus author ID, and the Thomson ResearcherID.  This makes me wonder what ever happened to the Digital Author Identifier system in the Netherlands.

A Google search turns up

Digital Author Identification (DAI) is a unique national number assigned to every author who has been appointed to a position at a Dutch university or research institute or has some other relevant connection with one of these organisations. SURF and OCLC PICA have set up a link with the PICA thesaurus of personal names that is maintained and updated by the university libraries. One very important factor in this system is the link between the Metis research information system and the repository.

surffoundation.nl - Digital Author Identifier (DAI)

Searching also turns up a paper and running system for UAI_Sys

UAI_Sys is a pilot Java web application allowing each one author to register/update his/her own metadata content and request a unique identifier that s/he is going to retain and make use of for life. Apart from obtaining his/her unique author identifier (codenamed: UAI code), the author specifies the subset of his/her personal (meta)data that s/he wishes to become globally available to all interested parties, including variations of his/her name used in publications s/he has (co-)authored. The system supports the industrial standard interface for other applications to connect to and co-function with, over the Internet.

See UAI_Sys application and paper at DLIST.

Of course, this gets me thinking about Name Authorities and whether there's some way to get a worldwide name authority unique ID.  I discover that Lorcan of course has already written about this: Names, Names, Names - VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File)

UPDATE 2008-02-25: I also found a report from a Knowledge Exchange Institutional Repositories workshop - Author identification report (PDF, September 2007).

Thomson CTO says semantic enhancement through good metadata is the future

It's interesting to see the business perspective on the value of good metadata.

Thomson's chief technology officer [Michael Wilens], an MIT-educated engineer ... spends most of his time manning servers that handle almost as much data as Google Inc. or Yahoo Inc. on a daily basis

...

Mr. Wilens isn't merely concerned with the next three months: He is looking ahead to the next 10 years, to the intense technological race he expects to unfold between Thomson and rivals such as Bloomberg.

The competition for high-end financial, legal and scientific data is just getting started, he argues.

The coming decade will see extensive amounts of time and money invested by companies like Thomson and Bloomberg to develop artificial intelligence capable of crunching the vast amounts of information circulating throughout the world each day.

It will be used to develop what Mr. Wilens calls “meta-data,” or the ability for computers to create “smarter” information from existing data.

...

“The war of the future, in all information services and on the Internet, is going to be fought around data, about data,” Mr. Wilens said last week. “The ability to build products quickly and get them into the market faster than competitors is really critical.”

...

“All we need to do, though, is put additional data fields on those news articles [or company statements] that say this was a positive article, this was a negative article, or this was the specific individual that said it. All of a sudden you can build analytics against it.”

Globe and Mail - Thomson's challenge: Make data smarter - October 9, 2007

let library machines talk to machines, so that library humans can better serve patrons

Or in other words: "Free the Humans" (available as stylish tshirt).

I think it may be difficult coming from a non-CS background to conceptualize how fundamentally important it is to make library data machine-readable, to enable easy interoperability and extendability.

That's why I loved this posting in ALA Techsource, which explains it all much better than I could:

Out of the Secret Garden: The RDA/DC Initiative

library service discovery and delivery

I get the sense that Daniel Chudnov and I are talking about similar problems from different angles.
I'm talking about how to get from ideas to more standard (network) services for libraries to expose and consume, he's talking about how to ensure that all available services get jammed everywhere in a user's environment.

One Big Library - NASIG 2007 talk: A New Approach to Service Discovery and Resource Delivery

open data and more from Peter and Paul

Both Paul Miller and Peter Murray-Rust have interesting ideas about our changing information environment, so what could be better than the former interviewing the latter?

Peter Murray-Rust Talks with Talis about Open Access, Open Data, Science, and the Semantic Web

via Open Access News

Stephen Downes says Semantic Web will never work

Stephen says it won't work because companies will never open their data and co-operate.
This is interesting, because it is almost diametrically opposed to my reasoning.

I asserted ("why the Semantic Web will never work", June 24, 2006) that the individual SW will fail because individuals will never properly mark up their content.
I believe that, to the extent that the SW will work at all, it will be at a corporate level, because they're the only ones organized enough to do mass markup.

via Slashdot Why the Semantic Web Will Fail /.

PLoS ONE launches with document meta layers and linking

I think if anyone can figure out how to do annotation well, that will be a killer app, but so far there is no "YouTube for annotations".

Most of the PLoS content is not very accessible/interesting to me, but I did explore Concentration of the Most-Cited Papers in the Scientific Literature: Analysis of Journal Ecosystems. PLoS supports both annotations and discussions.

As well, many (but not all) of the reference have a "find this article online" link. As far as I can tell, it parses the link up into a format it can pass to PubMed or Google Scholar. So for example

Garfield E. (2006) The history and meaning of the impact factor. JAMA 295: 90–93.

has a link

http://www.plosone.org/article/findArticle.action?author=Garfield&title=The history and meaning of the impact factor.

presumably if you want to hack, err, "mashup" PLoS findArticle, you just have to pass it an appropriate author= and title=

When you click the above link, you get yet another PLoS page, which says

The article may exist at:

* PubMed/NCBI
* Google Scholar

which seems like a rather click-heavy way to get to a result set.

The links it constructs are

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Garfield%5Bauthor%5D+AND+The history and meaning of the impact factor.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&safe=off&q=author%3AGarfield+%22The history and meaning of the impact factor.%22

Is it just me or are we maybe not leveraging the full richness of article metadata here?
As far as I can tell, PLoS ONE knows nothing about OpenURLs, or resolvers.

via Open Access News - PLoS ONE launches

Flickr Uploadr resize loses metadata

Summary: If you want to preserve EXIF-GPS and IPTC metadata in your photos when uploading to Flickr, do not use the auto-resize feature in Flickr Uploadr.

Details:

Picasa allows you to embed some useful metadata directly in your photo files.  These metadata include IPTC keywords, IPTC caption, and EXIF-GPS location information.  Flickr has the capability to automatically detect these metadata, saving you from having to retype or re-create them (keywords are turned into tags).

I noticed some odd behavior with the Flickr Uploadr, so I decided to do a systematic test.

Using Picasa 2.5 + Google Earth
* geocode image
* IPTC tag image
* IPTC caption image

Windows Uploadr 2.3 (and 2.5)
Mac Uploadr 2.2

Scenarios
1. Windows Uploadr (already resized)
2. Windows Uploadr (auto resize to 800)
3. Windows direct web upload
4. Mac Uploadr (already resized)
5. Mac Uploadr (auto resize to 800)
6. Mac direct web upload

1 IPTC ok, EXIF-GPS ok
2 IPTC no, EXIF-GPS ok *
3 IPTC ok, EXIF-GPS ok
4 IPTC ok, EXIF-GPS ok
5 IPTC ok, EXIF-GPS no *
6 IPTC ok, EXIF-GPS ok

So if you resize in Windows Uploadr, it will lose your IPTC tags and keywords, while, just for variety, if you resize in Mac Uploadr, it will lose your EXIF-GPS.

UPDATE 2007-08-09: Incredibly, Flickr Windows Uploadr 2.5 still loses IPTC metadata on resize.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2008-09-28: Flickr Windows Uploadr 3.0.5 doesn't have this issue, IPTC metadata is preserved on resize; they have fixed the problem.  ENDUPDATE

I used an image of the London Millennium Wheel.
First I added IPTC keywords using the little-known CTRL-K option in Picasa.
The only drawback is you can't have multi-word keywords.

I also added a caption in Picasa.
(Minor disclaimer: I initially spelled Millennium wrong and fixed it after.)

Last but not least, I geocoded the photo using the Picasa-Google Earth integration (you can read more about this capability in a previous posting).

With the file now geocoded and IPTC tagged and captioned, I verified it in IrfanView.  (I also used IrfanView to do a resize of the photo to 800x600 for some of the upload tests.) As you can see from the IrfanView photo information inspection, the image now contains both EXIF-GPS and IPTC keywords.

Now, when it all works, it's great.  The photo arrives at Flickr and the metadata are automatically read and filled in for you.

But when you let Flickr Uploadr resize the image on Windows, goodbye IPTC info

On the Mac, just for variety, Uploadr resize keeps the IPTC, but loses the EXIF-GPS.

I hope you've found this report useful, and I hope it leads to Flickr fixing the Uploadr immediately.

Here's the photo itself (the #1 upload, with all the metadata intact)

online library role in discovering and delivering

Lorcan Dempsey has a thoughtful post Discovery and disclosure, about making your content visible (disclosing its availability) in as many venues as possible.

As I indicated in a previous post, I think libraries are having a hard time thinking about availability, discoverability and creativity in an online world.

To me it is useful to understand these as a workflow:

1. create content
2. discover content
3. get content (find out where it is available)

I am going to set creativity aside again, since I don't think libraries perceive they have a major role as e.g. video studios, audio recording studios, pottery studios etc.

I think the key is to understand that people always want to get (this is sometimes termed as "people want to find, not to search").  In the physical world, the library is a logical starting point for discovery, since it will also be the place where you get most of the content.

And lets be clear: the discovery process in the physical world is both complex and often unsatisfactory.  The card catalogue plays a role, the physical shelving and proximity of the books plays a role, and the staff are essential.  But a card catalogue is a pretty thin metadata source - there's a limit to how hard you can make those few items of data work.

Now, lets move to the online world.  The workflow (I briefly wrote "worldflow") is the same, but the individual steps use different technologies in different locations.  Again skipping creativity.  As long as there is "enough" content online, the discovery will start online.

And, this is critical, it will start at whatever site offers the best discovery experience.  Now, what data would you rather be mining: thin card catalogue data where the model is (or was until recently) exact title match, or rich full-text data that includes a web of interconnections.

Now remember, this discovery is just a starting point.  Libraries bemoan losing the search experience to Google.  But that's a false perception.  How long are you actually on Google?  Five seconds before you click on the first result?  Less?  It's not like Google has captured the user experience.  Google is a brief stopover on the way to the web.  What people want is the third step in the workflow: actually getting the content immediately from the web.

As long as you understand the library's role online as making content available, you can see there is still a role for the library to play.  But, understand that people want immediate gratification: to the extent that the library can deliver immediate full text, they will be most interested. 

Also understand, as I mentioned previously, that people are no longer interested in the book as container, they are interested in the book as content.  That's why full-text search is so important. 

Let's compare the user experience on the query xml soap outsourcing on WorldCat and Google Book Search

http://worldcat.org/search?q=xml+soap+outsourcing&submit=Search

No results were found for: 'xml soap outsourcing'

http://books.google.com/books?q=xml+soap+outsourcing&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=0

1 - 10 with 26 pages

That is the critical difference in discoverability betwen library catalogue driven systems, and full-text search systems.  I assert you literally can't make the cat data work hard enough to approach the discoverability experience offered by Google and Amazon.  Therefore, surrender, and reposition yourselves within the workflow.

Let's explore this further.  In the physical world, existence + location = availability.

If the library can tell you "we have Five Fists of Science" and it's on shelf X, or on loan and due back on date Y, it's available.

Available for you to come in person to the library and physically get.

Online availability is different.

Online existence + deliverability = availability.

It doesn't suffice simply to know that a book is in the library, what I want to know is when the book (or its contents) can come to me.  That means online availability includes delivery options as a crucial element.

Can I get it immediately on my desktop as an e-book and/or audiobook?  Can I have it on all my mobile devices?  Can I get the book from the library in the mail?  Can I get it couriered to me today?  Can it be delivered with my newspaper tomorrow morning?  Can I get it from Amazon?  Can I get it used from Abebooks or Alibris?  Does someone who lives near me have a copy?  Is it on Project Gutenberg?  Available as a book-on-demand printed copy?  Can someone come read it to me?   Can someone read it to me over the telephone?  Is there a book club that is covering it?  Can someone explain it to me? ...

You can see that in the online world, you're no longer in the warehousing business.  You're in the logistics and collaborative partnership business.  You have to decide where your library should fit, are you a single one of the above options, or are you an enabler for all of them?

There is no logic, to me, in the library trying to run this supply chain.  I think libraries need to outsource and insource - connect out to partners as well as let them connect in to you.

What's your delivery strategy?

Have you considered partnering with:

• your postal service
• local and national couriers, e.g. FedEx and UPS
• other local delivery services, like your local newspapers
• volunteer organizations
• ebook and audiobook providers
• mobile device providers
• Google, Amazon, AbeBooks, Alibris, WorldCat, LibraryThing, Project Gutenberg, ...

I see WorldCat is making some tiny steps in this direction, offering the option to order from Amazon.com, and to even provide the affiliate money to a chosen library.  Both of these are however US-only options.  Amazon.ca and Canadian postal codes do not appear to be an option.

Steve Cohen also makes a good point that even if a book is available in a WorldCat library, you may not have permission to get it.

Word 2007 and the bibliographic processing future

There is an opportunity for the library and scholarly community to work with the various word processor builders to get to some common standards.

The main players that I'm aware of being Word 2007 and OpenOffice.

Jennifer Michelstein of Microsoft has the (mis)fortune of starting her MS blogging career with the posting [Word 2007] Academic features: citation & bibliography tools.

There's some nice stuff, but I have two concerns:

1. The focus is on building your Master List inside of Word.  Yes, you can share lists, but I don't want Word to be the citation master at all

Once a source is created, it lives in two places: your Master List and your Current List. The Master List is the database of all sources ever created. The Current List includes all of the sources that will be used in the current document.

The purpose of the Master List is to save you from re-typing and re-entering information about sources that you commonly use. For example, if you are a Shakespeare scholar and always cite the same five Shakespearean references, you can just select these sources in your Master List and click Copy to add them to your Current List. Now you can cite them throughout your document.

Maybe Connotea is my "master list", or EndNote, or Bookends.  You know, separation of concerns?  Let my bibliographic software be the master of citation management.  Make Word the master of communicating with all major citation repositories, whether local on my machine, or out on the web.

2. They will talk to libraries... somehow.  With a software development kit (SDK) that doesn't exist yet.  Um, how about we get that kit, immediately?

we are building a platform on the Research and Reference pane, to enable connecting to a library database and importing metadata about sources. We’ll publish an SDK so that Microsoft or any 3rd party data provider can build a service that fits nicely into our Bibliography tools. This project is underway, but the functionality isn’t available externally in Beta2. This sounds like a topic better handled in its own post.

darcusblog (Bruce D'Arcus, of the OpenOffice Bibliographic Project) has written extensively (and critically) about the current state of the art in citation management in Word 2007

via Dan on eScience

citations to DOIs

This is neat

http://www.crossref.org/freeTextQuery/

This form allows you to locate DOIs for references input as simple text. References should be formatted in a standard bibliographic representation

but where's the API?  (REST, Web Services, whatever)

via Open Access News

why the Semantic Web will never work

Surfing Digg led me to 9 Ways to Misunderstand Web Standards which led me to the awesome 2001 article Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia by Cory Doctorow.

He makes great points about the futility of the Semantic Web dream, including:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy

Previously:
January 17, 2006  in which I learn the HTML acronym tag

Postgenomic - conference review markup

If you've written a blog entry that contains some useful information about a conference - be it some background information, ancedotes or even a full blown conference report - then you can get it indexed properly by Postgenomic by marking an anchor tag that links to the URL of the conference homepage with a rel="conference" attribute, like so:

I've just come back from <a rel="conference" href="[URL of conference homepage]">BioWidgetWorld 2006</a>, where I saw a kickass presentation...

from http://postgenomic.com/about_reviews.php

I still have my doubts about any kind of embedded semantic markup catching on.  I think it's probably better just to look for an agreed-upon conference tag attached to the posting.

I do think it is reasonable to ask the conferences themselves to provide some markup, particularly a standard syntax to:
- identify the conference tag
- identify the conference dates and location
- identify the conference topics (keywords... tags?)
- identify the conference abstract ("this conference is about making widgets using lasers")

Basically what I'm saying is I don't think "the crowd" is likely to do more than simple tagging of their posts, but it is reasonable to ask the few people doing conference websites to do a bit of semantic markup.

Postgenomic is experimenting with conference mapping and reporting.

http://postgenomic.com/meetings.php

via chem-bla-ics

OpenOffice Bibliographic Project

The bibliographic project will design and build an easy to use and comprehensive bibliographic facility within OpenOffice. It will be easy to use for the casual user, but will meet all the requirements of the professional and academic writer. The new bibliographic facility will utilise the latest open standards and will make the fullest use of emerging XML, XSLT, RDF and SRU/W technology.

http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/

I think this might be a promising central point for collaboration in the area of bibliographic integration with software.  Since you need the citation information in your document composition environment, why not just build bibliographic capabilities right in?

UPDATE

Bruce D'Arcus of the Geography Department of Miami University is the co-project leader. He has a blog.

A couple interesting postings from his blog:

• December 17, 2005  Citation Metadata Workflow
• January 28, 2006  A Model for Citation Metadata

His blog leads me to discover there is a HubMed Blog - Hublog, with a posting from December 17, 2005 Academic Metadata Workflow.

ENDUPDATE

via JISC Middleware for Distributed Cognition

ZoneTag - Flickr auto geocoding for cellphone pics

Find your photos by location
ZoneTag can automatically tag your photos with the location, based on the cell tower, [near] which they were taken. The location of the cell tower is not known until our user community updates the city, state, or zip code of their photos on Flickr. ZoneTag is then able to map the cell tower to the location.

http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/zonetag/

via TechCrunch - Zoomr

Previously:
March 12, 2006  a couple neat photo tagging and geocoding apps

a couple neat photo tagging and geocoding apps

One neat thing about having a blog is sometimes info comes to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

Via a comment on universal photo tagging - almost, I find

ITag - Photo Tagging Software

ITag is a free tool that is designed to make editing of key IPTC fields of your digital photos very easy.  The editable IPTC fields are Headline, Caption and Keywords (which effectively translates into title, description and tags).  The IPTC data can be read by other software such as IrfanView and Flickr.

Geocoding your photos is also straight forward by drag and dropping Google Earth placemarks (*.kml).  When geocoding, the data can optionally be saved as IPTC tags (Flickr style), to the EXIF fields or both.

Geocoded photos can be opened in Google Earth to see the location they were encoded with.  Photos geocoded with WWMX Location Stamper are also recognised and can be viewed in Google Earth.  Groups of photos can be selected and the photo's viewed in a single kml - like this.

There is also an option to convert GPX tracklogs to KML (Google Earth) format.

WWMX Location Stamper

checks a digital photo's embedded timestamp, correlates it to GPS track files loaded in GPX format ..., then stamps the image with latitude and longitude location information.  Don't have a GPS device?  This application can also be used to drag and drop your images onto a map in order to stamp them.

That's pretty neat.  Both apps require Windows with .NET installed.

For the Mac, a Google search turned up GPS Photo Linker.

The functionality of these apps actually raises an issue, which is

Dear Google,

Instead of (or in addition to) stuff like buying Writely, it would be nice if you would enhance your existing applications.  For example, Picasa - Google Earth integration would be a natural (UPDATE 2006-06-18: Google added this feature.  Thanks!).  Enhanced use of IPTC in Picasa and Google Image Search would also make sense.  Also, what happened to the Picasa blog?  http://picasa2.blogspot.com/ now gives 404 not found.

But also

Dear Digital Camera Makers,

Please have your cameras automatically geocode, e.g. by talking to a GPS over Bluetooth.  Or have it talk to my cellphone, which may have a variety of ways to determine where I'm located.

UPDATE 2006-04-02: Also check out my new page on how to geocode photos.

urns to contain your identifiers: isbn, lsid

A URN is a syntax that, amongst other things, you can embed on a web page, like a URL.

There is an IETF RFC 2288 from 1998, status "informational":
Using Existing Bibliographic Identifiers as Uniform Resource Names

It puts forward the following URN syntaxes:

urn:isbn:
urn:issn:
urn:sici:

The SICI code, which is new to me, is a standard syntax for constructing a string to identify a particular journal issue or article.

RFC 3187, from 2001, investigates the ISBN URN further:
Using International Standard Book Numbers as Uniform Resource Names

RFC 3044, also from 2001, expands on the ISSN URN:
Using The ISSN (International Serial Standard Number) as URN (Uniform Resource Names) within an ISSN-URN Namespace

ISBN and ISSN are both registered namespaces; SICI is not:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces

There's a good posting URNs, bibliographic citations in web authoring from benmeadowcroft.com

So... where are all the blogs that use urn:isbn?
Where are the websites?  Not used on Amazon... not used on Chapters... not used in Google Book Search... not used in Innovative catalogue output...
I see lots of examples of people talking about the theory of how they could be used... but I don't actually see anyone using them.

Are we back to the Semantic Web trap I talked about before in my posting in which I learn the HTML acronym tag?

Is it a tool problem?  Do we need more and better Firefox extensions for urn:isbn?
The only one I could find in Mozilla Extensions is URN Support, which will point ISBN URNs to Amazon.

Anyway, this leads me to LSIDs.
LSID is a proposed Life Science IDentifier, one of many projects working to address the data issue pointed out by Dr. Lyon in her presentation: "Persistent identifiers for data citation".

First, here are some links via Glen Newton:

Resolver: >> http://lsid.sourceforge.net/

Article: >> Bio-IT World, January 2004 LSID: An Informatics Lifesaver

Excamples: >> http://lsid.biopathways.org/

Spec: >> http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/apps/doc?dtc/04-05-01.pdf

Purely by coincidence, I happened to then be reading iPhylo, just to come upon a couple relevant postings:

February 9, 2006  Globally Unique Identifiers

I attended the TDWG-GUID workshop on Global Unique Indenitifers (GUIDs) held at NESCent, which has issued a report. Essentially, the aim of this work is to deploy globally unique identifiers for digital objects in biodiversity informatics, such as taxon names, specimen records, images, etc. The workshop settled on LSIDs (Life Science Identifiers), which is a sensible choice.

LSIDs have been around, and there is considerable software support from IBM (see their project on SourceForge). I've used them in my Taxonomic Search Engine. Not everybody is thrilled by LSIDs (see Anyone using LSID? on NodalPoint).

February 15, 2006  LSID Firefox extension update

I've updated my extension to resolve LSIDs in Firefox so that it works with version 1.5.0.1 (the most recent version of Firefox). The extension is available from Mozdev. It may take a little while for the mirrors to update with the new version, so if you get a "404" when trying to download, you may need to come back later.

IBM's LSID project have their own Firefox extension LSID Launchpad for Firefox, which is a lot slicker than mine. It's in beta, but well worth a look.

The next part is perhaps a technical detail, but somewhat confusing to me:

urn:lsid:ubio.org.lsid.zoology.gla.ac.uk:namebankID:10386 becomes clickable, and you can see the metadata associated with the LSID. For the technically minded, they add support for the lsidres protocol to Firefox.

So should it be urn:lsid, or this lsidres:urn:lsid?  Why do you need lsidres?

A side note, and a question:
1) LSID does not appear to (yet) be an IANA registered URN namespace
2) Are there any issues with just assuming that urn:isbn: should also take an ISBN13?

So what do you think?
It seems to me people push very hard on this Semantic Web / Structured Blogging / Microformats / COINS stuff, but it doesn't seem to be getting much traction.

So we all work to promote the use of urn:isbn, with a browser extension that resolves to your choice of libraries and booksellers?  Should we be lobbying Amazon, our OPAC vendors, and everyone who outputs web pages with ISBNs to start wrapping them with urn:isbn?

Yahoo bought WebJay

I read about this on the 9th in O'Reilly Radar.

SearchEngineWatch Blog has a good story as usual: Yahoo Acquires Webjay.
In it Gary Price points out the Yahoo Music Blog.

I think it is interesting to speculate exactly what they are buying.

(I guess I should say first what Webjay is: a music playlist sharing community.)

Web 2.0 buzz?
A user community?
A standard for exchanging lists of music tracks?

This last one interests me.
Suppose I have read a bunch of interesting journal articles online.
How should I bundle up the references to them and send the info to you?

A list of DOIs?
A bunch of raw citation information you have to process in some software of your own?
Connotea links?
OpenURLs?
EndNote or some other citation format?

Unfortunately this rapidly starts to edge into territory in which librarians are quite expert, and in which I am totally lost.  I can copy and paste a list from some conference blogging I did at InfoGrid 2005...

need XML-based representation for compound objects
- many options MPEG-21 DIDL, METS, IMS/CP, RDF...

UPDATE 2006-01-14: XMP

I don't actually know the details of what any of those are.

CrossRef search and Web Services

CrossRef has announced two new servicies to enhanace scholarly searching.  From yesterday's press release:

CrossRef, the independent cross-publisher linking service, announced today two forthcoming initiatives that will enhance the way search engines index scholarly content: CrossRef Web Services and the Search Partner Program. CrossRef Web Services will create an easy-to-use tool for authorized search and web services partners to gather metadata to streamline web crawling. The CrossRef metadata database contains records for the more than 18 million items from over 1,500 publishers, the majority of whom are expected to choose to participate in this optional new service. The CrossRef Search Partner program provides standard terms of use for search engines, libraries, and other partners to use the metadata available from CrossRef Web Services....CrossRef Web Services also...functions as a notification, or “ping”, mechanism for the publication of new content. Alerting crawlers to new or revised content to be indexed greatly reduces the need for ongoing re-crawling of publisher sites. “Search engines want better ways to gather standard, cross-publisher metadata to enhance their search indexes. Publishers want to streamline the way they provide metadata to a growing number of partners. CrossRef Web Services and the Search Partner Program fill this void,” said Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef. “With CrossRef repurposing parts of its metadata database and using common protocols like standardized XML and OpenURL (and SOAP, RSS and other protocols in future), these services can significantly enhance indexes.” Mr. Pentz continued

via Open Access News

bibliographic software for the Mac

Macintouch has been maintaining a reader report on Bibliographic Software for the Mac.

Euro Fedora User Meeting 2005 - Fedora Content Models for the National Science Digital Library Data Repository (NDR)

13:15

Fedora Content Models for the National Science Digital Library Data Repository (NDR) (PowerPoint)
Carl Lagoze
Cornell Information Science

... Information Network Overlay

a digital library (particularly science DL) is more than just documents: it's data, orgs, people, services

all (primary resource) objects named with handles in overlay

... including Access Controlled API

interested in very rich granualarity and access control

some of this is still theoretical, not in production yet

1 million metadata records in Oracle (Dublin Core) will = a digital object in Fedora
there are ancillary objects around the metadata = about 2.1 million objects

NSDL is not a content library, it is a metadata library
but it will be possible to add content e.g. lesson plans

each object turns into about 60 triples = about 60 million? 120 million triples

NDR currently one Fedora repository, will become ? federated repositories

want to build representations of people in the NSDL, so that you can build a reputation system for those people
"this person is expert in X"

can use proai to expose using oai anything that you can connect with a disseminator?

make sets using aggregation