After several abortive attempts a correspondent asked on the CML Blog:
“How do you put in XML?”
I’m at one of the best places in the world to answer this (perhaps after a day more). I’ve travelled to the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba – a fantastic setting – but before you get too jealous it has rained most of the time. This is a good thing as QLers are on a severe drought restriction – nor car washing or gardens (I’ll find out whether cricket pitches are exempt).
My host is Peter Sefton and his group, Daniel de Byl, Ron Ward and Oliver Lucido in the ICE (The Integrated Content Environment) project of the Learning Futures Innovation Institute). USQ is very strong in distance learning and therefore put much store on the quality of the learning material. For example they have developed tools whereby course materials can be repurposed as student notes, instructor resources, slides, etc. All though Open technology such as XML, RSS, CSS, Java etc.
Much of what they have done is of great value to semantic science. The group has already worked out how to put CML molecules into various compound documents in a variety of formats – Word, Open Office, PDF, HTML, etc. It’s hard work and this post records my appreciation for it
Peter runs his own blog and here’s the most recent post:
This site is now Zotero friendly, courtesy of the unAPI plugin for WordPress
If you’re using the Zotero research tool (and if you read this blog you probably should) you should now see the little icons to add posts to Zotero up in your Firefox address bar. Save metadata for your favourite posts! Cite me!
This will only work for the WordPress part of the site, post November 2007.
Reading the list of ingredients it seems like I am now metadata central:The server provides records for each WordPress post and page in the following formats: OAI-Dublin Core (oai_dc), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), SRW-Dublin Core (srw_dc), MARCXML, and RSS. The specification makes use of LINK tag auto-discovery and an unendorsed microformat for machine-readable metadata records.
http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/This is courtesy of the unAPI plugin, found via the Zotero site.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few other WordPress sites I’d like to have this so I can use them in my research.
- Bruce D’Arcus
- Peter Murray-Rust (Jim Downing too)
- The ICE blog.
The download page has clear instructions about how to install the plugin.
PMR: This is typical of the many tools that the group has developed. I don’t use Zotero yet, but I am sure we shall integrate into our thesis authoring stuff.
So we hope to set up an ongoing collaboration. This shares the work, helps to avoid pitfalls, increases advocacy, visibility and adoption. The specific question of XML in blogs related to comments – the current WordPress seems to do fairly well on XML.
And maybe a return visit when they find the sun in QL.