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Update about new XMP Library from Adobe Labs: “The new Adobe XMP Library for ActionScript is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. XMP is an open technology based on RDF and RDF/XML. With this new library you can read existing XMP metadata from Flash based file formats via the Adobe Flash Player.

I was playing around recently and ran across this little metadata hack. At first, I thought somebody was doing something new. But no, nothing so forward apparently. (Heh! 🙂 I was attempting to grab the response headers from an HTTP request on an article page and was using by default the Perl LWP library. For some reason I was getting metadata elements being spewed out as response headers - at least from some of the sites I tested.

Once structured metadata is added to a file then retrieving a given metadata element is usually a doddle. For example, for PDFs with embedded XMP one can use Phil Harvey’s excellent Exiftool utility. Exiftool is a Perl library and application which I’ve blogged about here earlier which is available as a ‘.zip‘ file for Windows (no Perl required) or ‘.dmg‘ for MacOS. Note that Phil maintains this actively and has done so over the last five years.

Well, as I blogged on our web publishing blog Nascent we just went live with XMP labelling on Nature in yesterday’s double issue. We will be adding XMP to all new issues of Nature as well as rolling out across all our other titles in the next few weeks and months. The screenshots below from Acrobat (File > Properties, CMD-D / CTL-D) show what the user might see both with (bottom-left) and without (top-right) semantic markup.

I wanted to make some remarks about the “Ease of use” and “Learn curve” ratings which I gave in the ORE/POWDER comparison table that I blogged about here the other day. It may seem that I came out a little harsh on ORE and a little easy on POWDER. I just wanted to rationalize the justification for calling it that way. (By the way, the revised comparison table includes a qualification to those ratings.)

My primary interest was from the perspective of a data provider rather than a data consumer. What does it take to get a resource description document (“resource map”, “description resource” or “sitemap”) ready for publication?

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Following right on from yesterday’s post on ORE and POWDER, I’ve attempted to map the worked examples in the ORE User Guide for RDF/XML (specifically Sect. 3) to POWDER to show that POWDER can be used to model ORE, see Resource Maps Encoded in POWDER (A full explanation for each example is given in the RDF/XML Guide, Sect. 3 which should be consulted.) This could just all be sheer doolally or might possibly turn out to have a modicum of instructional value – I don’t know.

I’ve been reading up on POWDER recently (the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources) which is currently in last call status (with comments due in tomorrow). This is an effort to describe groups of Web resources and as such has clear similarities to the Open Archives Initiative ORE data model, which has been blogged about here before. In an attempt to better understand the similarities (and differences) between the two data models, I’ve put up the table which directly compares the two heavyweight contendors OAI-ORE and POWDER and also (unfairly) places them alongside the featherweight Sitemaps Protocol for reference.

A quick straw poll of a few folks at London Online yesterday revealed that they had not heard of CURIE’s. And there was I thinking that most everybody must have heard of them by now. 🙂 So anyway here’s something brief by way of explanation.

CURIE stands for Compact URI and does the signal job or rendering long and difficult to read URI strings into something more manageable. (URIs do have the particular gift of being “human transcribable” but in practice their length and the actual characters used in the URI strings tend to muddy things for the reader.) So given that the Web is built upon a bedrock of URIs, anything that then makes URIs easier to handle is going to be an important contributor to our overall ease of interaction with the Web.

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So the other day Noel O’Boyle made me feel guilty when he pinged me and asked about the possibility using one of the Crossref APIs for creating a Ubiquity extension. You see, I had played with the idea myself and had not gotten around to doing much about it. This seemed inexcusable- particularly given how easy it is to build such extensions using the API we developed for the WordPress and Moveable Type plugins that we announced earlier in the year.

I just wanted to flag up here Lisa Rogers’ recent review article on RSS in FUMSI (the online magazine for information professionals published by Free Pint Ltd) RSS and Scholarly Journal Tables of Contents: the ticTOCs Project, and Good Practice Guidelines for Publishers Especially of interest is the diagram in Fig. 2 which breaks out the metadata elements that might be encountered in a rich web feed. Worthwhile pointing out that this reflects current practice and that under the item elements one would soon hope to see publishers routinely adding in prism:doi (with the bare DOI as value) and prism:url (with DOI target URL as value) from the PRISM 2.