I talk with Herbert van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. We discuss Herbert’s pivotal role in the development of SFX and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), before turning to a broader discussion of issues related to the use of repositories in preserving and providing access to scholarly literature and data. Less

Thomson Reuters announced commercial options for its sophisticated metadata generation service Open Calais at the EmTech conference last week. Andy interviewed Tom Tague, Vice President of Solutions for Thomson Reuters, about the service and its implications for the semantic web. Both commercial and non-commercial publishers will be able to continue using the service for free up to 40,000 times a day, "which is a lot of documents," Tague says. Customers that want contractual service and 24/7 surveillance can now purchase one of its professional services for a couple of thousand dollars a month. Open Calais automatically creates metadata for people, places, organizations, and other items within content, improves tagging, and incorporates pictures. Tague it offers the service for free because it wants its natural language processing technology to be the best in the world, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to expose it to thousands of users and hyper-evolve it, Tague says. It's also a move that will help Thomson Reuters stay relevant in the face of the exploding volume of user-generated content on the web. "[T]he first step toward being relevant to that and maintaining our relevancy in the marketplace for our core consumers, financial professionals, is to make that content interoperable, to let you use the web's content but let you bounce it against Thomson Reuters content to double check it, to get value, to validate it," he says. "You don't make $20 million hedge fund bets on the basis of a Twitter stream." Paul Miller reported on the new commercial offerings of Open Calais at ZDNet. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer Less

David Riecks presented findings from the Stock Artists Alliance Photo Metadata Project at the 2008 Pro Photo Summit. The project looked at how stock agencies ensure that their digital assets have the right kind of metadata so that they can accurately search through (and find stuff) in their massive libraries of images. Apologies for my crazy British pronunciations... you'll get used to it ;-) Less

David Weinberger kicks off this interview series by interviewing novelist, BoingBoing co-editor, digital rights activist and entrepreneur Cory Doctorow. Less

Talk about design patterns for ideal offroad sites. The value of metadata storage and the almost complete loss of metadata associated with typical forum posts. Thread hijacking is also discussed along with calendaring between different organizations that share common goals. Beware the spooky and frighteningly loud cough about 50 seconds from the end. Less