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Not to get too self-referential here, but it was very cool to see that Tony Hammond has managed to get Not to get too self-referential here, but it was very cool to see that Tony Hammond has managed to get This based on a podcast interview with Tony posted on January 26th.

Although most folks will already know about this it still seems significant enough to blog the arrival of XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2.0, and XPath 2.0. See the W3C Press Release.

Was rooting around for some information and stumbled across this page which may be of interest: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2006/08/namespaced-extensions-in-feeds.html Namespaced Extensions in Feeds Thursday, August 03, 2006 posted by Mihai Parparita “I wrote a small MapReduce program to go over our BigTable and get the top 50 namespaces based on the number of feeds that use them.” Seems quite an impressive percentage for PRISM.

First off, a Happy New Year to all! A post of mine to the OpenURL list may possibly be of interest. Following up the recent W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group) Finding on “The Use of Metadata in URIs” I pointed out that the TAG do not seem to be aware of OpenURL: which is both a standard prescription for including metadata in URI strings and a US information standard to boot.

Peter Suber reports on his Open Access News that Google is offering to digitize journal backfiles. The full text articles are available as images and for free hosted by Google. The deal is non-exclusive and publishers retain copyright (but many backfiles will be out of copyright) but Google will not supply the publisher with the electronic files - so non-exclusive means that the publisher or someone else could digitize the backfile too (but how to recover the costs when it’s all free in Google?

MIT’s Simile project has just released Exhibit, a ” lightweight structured data publishing framework.” Read that as “an easy-to-use mashup creation tool.” I have heard that Leigh has already started experimenting with it. I look forward to a writeup soon…

The STM Innovations meeting on December 7th in London was excellent. Leigh Dodds has a short summary of the day on his blog. Interestingly, I can’t find anything about the conference on the STM website.

1 was mentioned at the STM Innovations talk in London and it’s worth taking a look. It’s billed as the next generation of bibliographic management software - End Note but a lot more included. DOIs should be incorporated into this tool - I couldn’t find any mention of Crossref or DOIs.

Nice piece of advocacy here by Tim Bray for RELAX. High time to see someone standing up for RELAX - a much friendlier XML schema language.

This project - https://web.archive.org/web/20061004011422/www.journalsupplychain.com/ - (which needs a new name or clever acronym) has released a Mid Year Report. The pilot is being extended into 2007 and there is clearly value for publishers in having an unique ID for institutions at the licensing unit level. Ringgold, one of the project partners, has a great database with a validated hierarchy of institutions from consortia down to departments - I had a demo at Frankfurt. The report has some info on benefits for publishers and on possible business models. I think a central, neutral registry of unique IDs would be a real benefit to the industry.