Alf Eaton and Gavin Bell (Nature) out together a lively BOF this evening on scientific publishing. They presented many of the key components – XML, persistent identifiers, ontologies, etc. Nice to see credit being given to PLoS for its pioneering use of these things (e.g. IDs for supplemental data). A strong feeling from all that PDF must be supplemented of replaced by greater structure. “XML” is a useful mantra – although XML by itself is sometimes too constraining – and we need RDF. Maybe XMLRDF is a better mantra – it needs the XML to emphasis the difference from PDF and the RDF to point towards the future. An anecdote of how the bite gets bitten – a publisher had acquired a chunk of content from another source (? merger/acquisition) and found that the PDFs were read-only – the hamburgers had been encrypted and the password lost. So they could be viewed but not re-used . Time for a change! [ADDED IN PROOF] A much fuller post from Paul Miller

Now in XTech2007 – arrived in time for the afternoon session of XForms by Steve Pemberton. XForms allow you to pass XML into/out of forms rather than relying on HTML. In includes things like validation – if you tell it something is a date, then you can check in makes sense as a date. And there’s stuff about credit cards, etc. So it makes sense to adapt them for – say – chemistry so that we can check data and molecules on submission. I hadn’t looked at them for ca 3-4 years as I hadn’t seen any implementations. In fact, according to Steve, XForms has been the MOST implemented W3C spec ever. The reason I have missed them is that they tend to be used in mobiles as well as browsers and there is also a lot of star-centered business – a company whose customers all use XForms and there is central control. Nothing wrong with that, but it won’t be obvious to non-customers. Also the insurance industry has gone for them in a big way. But most of the implementations come from the actual communities rather than being based on libraries (which is what we need). There is XSmiles which might help us – I think it’s now mature. But the scale seems a bit daunting “we used to have 30 programmers working on UIs for 5 years, now we solved the problem in 1 year with only 10 programmers”. Sic. But there do seem to be plugins for Firefox (or they are in the pipeline). Using, I think, XBL and some with SVG. So maybe there is still hope for the browser in this area. But whether we can move quickly towards a validating chemical data entry tool … I will continue to hack with broken tools for a little while (In the original version of this post I used the erroneous “XMLForms”)