This is not a post I'd thought I'd write, because OpenURL is an awful spec. But last week I ended up in vigorous debate on Twitter after I posted what I thought was a casual remark: This ended up being a marathon thread about OpenURL, accessibility, bibliographic metadata, and more.
I spend a lot of time searching the web for bibliographic metadata and links to digitised versions of publications.
OK, a bit of hyperbole in the morning. One of the goals of RDF is to create the Semantic Web, an interwoven network of data seamlessly linked by shared identifiers and shared vocabularies. Everyone uses the same identifiers for the same things, and when they describe these things they use the same terms. Simples. Of course, the reality is somewhat different.
Some quick half-baked thoughts on citation matching. One of the things I'd really like to add to BioStor is the ability to parse article text and extract the list of literature cited. Not only would this be another source of bibliographic data I can use to find more articles in BHL, but I could also build citation networks for articles in BioStor.
Quick note to express the frustration I experience sometimes when dealing with taxonomic literature.
One of my pet projects is to build a "Universal Article Reader" for the iPad (or similar mobile device), so that a reader can seemlessly move between articles from different publishers, follow up citations, and get more information on entities mentioned in those articles (e.g., species, molecules, localities, etc.). I've made various toys towards this, the latest being a HTML5 clone of Nature's iPhone app.
The ability to create PDFs for the articles BioStor extracts from the Biodiversity Heritage Library has been the single most requested feature for BioStor. I've taken a while to get around to this -- for a bunch of reasons -- but I've finally added it today.
Today I finally got a project out the door. BioStor is my take on what an interface to theBiodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) could look like. It features the visualisations I've mentioned in earlier posts, such as Google maps based on extracted localities, and tag trees. It also has a modified version of my earlier BHL viewer.
In between the chaos that is term-time I've been playing with ways to view Biodiversity Heritage Library content. The viewer is crude, and likely to go off-line at any moment while I fuss with it, the you can view an example here.
One thing I find myself doing (probably more often than I should) is adding a reference to my Zotero library for an item in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). BHL doesn't have article-level metadata (see But where are the articles?), so when I discover a page of interest (e.g., one that contains the original description of a taxon) I store metadata for the article containing that page in my Zotero library.