COinS-PMH and Microformats
Update: A Firefox sidebar that you can use to try COinS-PMH out is now available at dchud’s blog.
I recently posted here regarding standards and libraries, specifically the need for lightweight APIs/formats for use in various projects. I also mentioned an article over at darcus blog regarding light vs complex, and there is even a bet that lightweight will win over heavyweight. While that can be debated, there is definitely a place for lightweight implementations.
An example would be COinS or more specifically COinS-PMH. I have to take a second to admit that I’m playing catch-up here and probably don’t understand all the background and possibilities, but what I’ve seen I definitely like. There’s days I feel like there’s too much history with libraries to ever catch-up but hopefully I’m catching the important ones. For reference here are the applicable specs/overviews:
- OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML
- ContextObjects in Spans Protocol for Metadata Harvesting - ROGUE Spec
An over simplification is that COinS is a way of using OpenURLs within HTML and COinS-PMH is a simplified OAI-PMH protocol/set-up that allows the easy extraction of metadata regarding an object marked with COinS. In otherwords it turns an HTML page into a sort of simple repository. While this doesn’t seem that great the idea becomes more fruitful when it’s used at sites like CiteULike, journal pages, etc.
If you haven’t already looked into microformats, I recommend doing so. Microformats in the simplest term is standardized markup. You markup things with specific tags, class names, etc and this allows people to create parsers to extract the information. I’ve also written about this before at my blog. The power of this becomes apparent when more people adopt it. To quote Mark Pilgrim (who is writing some of the parsers for microformats):
Imagine having your own private database of every person you’ve ever stumbled across online, and being able to download their vCards into your address book. And every event, which you can download into iCal/Sunbird/Outlook. Plus a list of all the Creative Commons-licensed content you’ve ever read, which you can repurpose — legally, according to the terms of the license. Now imagine searching such a database. And subscribing to your search results as a syndicated feed.
Lets apply this idea to COinS-PMH. I’m doing some research and browsing sites like CiteULike, Journals, my library’s OPAC, etc. I have a greasemonkey script/bookmarklet that adds a button beside any citation that is marked up properly. When I hit the button it adds it to a datastore I set-up (or someone else did) that I can then search or browse later to find what I really want. Since I have actual metadata about the objects I can integrate links to ILL forms, EndNote, etc. While some of this is already possible (saving to endnote, OpenURL buttons, etc) this creates a standardized markup that allows it to be extended in anyway I see fit.
I see this having some potential and I look forward to seeing where it leads. Hopefully more scripts and examples become available. Until then you may wish to look at the following posts:
Also, if your library is in the OCLC OpenURL Resolver Registry you can get a bookmarklet or greasemonkey script for use with your library that detects COinS. I found one for our library’s ILL request form. Pretty spiffy.
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December 8th, 2005 at 10:15 am
[...] Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin). [...]