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Crossref is hiring an R&D software engineer to work in our Oxford office. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on wide range of projects that promise to revolutionize scholarly publishing.

I’ve been meaning for some time to write something about DOI and so-called “Multiple Resolution”, which to be honest is the only technology feature of any real interest as concerns DOI. (DOI as a business and social compact for guaranteeing name persistence of Web resources has been an extraordinarily successful venture in the academic publishing world with more than 32m items registered and maintained over eight years of operation but that may not have required any specialized technology. More a consensus to adopt a single location service in the DOI proxy.)

Multiple resolution, though. Now, that’s something else. Seems like it should be able to offer a lot of general funkiness and yet it has not been much used up to now. And I have to wonder why.

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I’ve just put up for comment a revised mod_prism (0.3) of the existing mod_prism RSS 1.0 module. This is now updated to the current PRISM version (v2.0) which was released in February ’08 and reissued with Errata in July ’08. The current mod_prism draft is registered here. The new draft charts all (five) versions of the PRISM specification (v1.0-v2.0) and maps PRISM terms to RSS 1.0 elements. Though not required as such for use of terms within an RSS 1.

As posted here on the SRU Implementors list, the OASIS Search Web Services Technical Committee has announced the release of five Committee Drafts, informally known as: Abstract Protocol Definition (APD) Binding for SRU 1.2 Auxiliary Binding for HTTP GET CQL 1.2 Binding for OpenSearch Links to specific document formats are given at the bottom of the mail. A list of the TC public documents is also available here. The next phase of work for the TC will be the development of SRU/CQL 2.

Interesting post from Google, in which they say: “Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!” Puts Crossref’s 32,639,020 unique DOIs into some kind of perspective: 0.0033%. But nonetheless that trace percentage still seems to me to be reasonably large, especially in view of it forming a persistent and curated set.

Oh wow! A rather remarkable plea here from Dan Brickley on the public-lod mailing list which calls for the registrant of the dbpedia.org DNS entry to top it up with another 5+ years worth of clocktime. Some quotes: _“The idea of such a cool RDF namespace having only 6 months left on the DNS registration gives me the worries.” “If you could add another 5-10 years to the DNS registration I’d sleep easier at night.

So, Google’s Knol is now live (see this announcement on Google’s Blog). There’ll be comment aplenty about the merits of this service and how it compares to other user contributed content sites. But one curious detail struck me. In terms of citeability, compare how a Knol contribution (or “knol”) may be linked to as may be a corresponding entry in Wikipedia (here I’ve chosen the subject “Eclipse”): Knol https://web.archive.org/web/20080730124803/http://knol.google.com/k/jay-pasachoff/eclipse/IDZ0Z-SC/wTLUGw Wikipedia

Tony’s post highlights Knol’s “service” URIs. Another issue is that many Knol entries have nice long lists of unlinked references. The HTML code behind the references is very sparse. Might the DOI be of use in linking out from these references? I think so. Then, of course, there’s the issue of DOIs for Knols…

CrossTech is two years old (less one month) and we have now seen some 145 posts. Breaking the posts down by poster we arrive at the following chart: Note this is not any real attempt at vainglory, more a simple excuse to play with the wonderful Google Chart API. Also, above I’ve taken the liberty of putting up an image (.png), although the chart could have been generated on the fly from this link (or tinyurl here).

Roy Tennant in a post to XML4Lib announces a new list of library APIs hosted at https://web.archive.org/web/20080730080413/http://techessence.info/apis// A useful rough guide for us publishers to consider as we begin cultivating the multiple access routes into our own content platforms and tending to the “alphabet soup” that taken together comprises our public interfaces.