While I have no doubt that none of you were actually waiting for this moment, I am fairly excited.
Zotero, the new bibliographic manager from the folks at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, have released a WordPress plugin that embeds a COinS tag in each post making the content easily available to Zotero, and other software that can make use of COinS.
The plugin allows Zotero to detect all relevant bibliographic metadata for blog entries, including item type, title, author, date, and tags.
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The plugin works by embedding a standardized tag in each blog post, known as a COinS tag. COinS—or Context Objects in Spans—is a community-based standard for encoding bibliographic information in web pages. By installing the plugin, you make it possible for not only Zotero, but also other COinS interpreters to recognize and process your metadata, thereby supporting a new generation of semantic web tools and services. Other sites that currently embed COinS include Wikipedia and WorldCat.
The WP plugin is part of a larger effort on the part of the Zotero team to document best practices for exposing metadata. …
I’m all about exposing some metadata. And while I’m not suggesting that my blog actually has any content that one might want to put into a citation manager, I’m happy to make it easy on anyone who might want to.
Thank you Zotero and CHNM!
5 responses so far ↓
1 Iris // Feb 12, 2007 at 4:31 pm
In a curious twist of fate, this also puts our library’s open URL resolver button onto each of your posts. here’s what it looks like to me.
2 Mark // Feb 12, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Whoa! That’s not exactly what I had in mind. But it’s not totally unexpected, I guess, even based on the little I know about COinS.
Time to brush up on COinS soon, methinks. I’m not sure I want my content cluttering up things like this. Maybe another reason why all this “brave new world” of Web 2.0 won’t be as great as many think.
Of course, there’s a 2nd reason why I don’t want my content that widely available, but I’ll use the “cluttering up” reason as a prime one.
3 Andrea’s Metadata Blog » WordPress and COinS // Feb 13, 2007 at 1:21 pm
[...] was reading Jean’s Blog, and meditating upon the problem of the Principle of Least Effort. I’m currently in LS500 as [...]
4 Rick // May 4, 2007 at 9:06 am
To solve Iris’s issue & to get even more metadata which Zotero can export (including the post summary as an “abstract”), you might consider switching to unAPI.
5 Mark // May 5, 2007 at 9:06 am
Thanks, Rick. I’ll look into this. These are some of the things I really want and need to understand.
For instance, I’d love to be able to put my bibliography up in a great, simple XML format–perhaps some sort of citation microformat–that I can add to and update easily, that I can interlink the citations easily, and that are discoverable by others via unAPI, COInS or what have you.