Archive by category | Technology

Igor – a Google Wave robot to manage your references

(Google Wave hasn’t been released yet but if you’re interested in working with the preview you can request a developer account on the sandbox here) Google Wave is a new open source project from Google that holds a lot of promise as a platform for scholarly communication. It’s a little bit like email but allows for collaborative document editing, versioning and real time conversation within groups – check out Cameron and Martin’s archives for more. Igor is a proof of concept Wave robot that allows Wave users to pull in citations from Pubmed or their libraries on Connotea and CiteULike  … Read more

Gobbledygook Interview

Gobbledygook Interview

I was interviewed by Martin Fenner, a Clinical Fellow in Oncology at Hannover Medical School, for his column Gobbledygook on Nature Network. The interview is mainly about our new OAI-PMH service (which I blogged on earlier here) but also touches on the broader picture of Public Interfaces.  Read more

Wolfram|Alpha has potential, but I can’t see scientists using it for a while yet

Wolfram|Alpha has potential, but I can't see scientists using it for a while yet

Wolfram|Alpha should have launched officially by the time you read this, though it has been live since Friday evening. The execution is slick. The different result visualizations are a great idea. It’s loaded up with cool widgets and APIs. Most of the time the servers don’t fall over (despite some glaring security holes). To quote FriendFeeder Iddo Friedberg it’s “a free, somewhat simple interface to Mathematica”. Free for personal, non-commercial use, anyway. If you’ve got any questions about the GDP of Singapore then wolframalpha.com is the place to go.  Read more

A Catalog for Nature.com

A Catalog for Nature.com

We’re pleased to announce that Nature.com now has an OAI-PMH interface. This service implements the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting from the Open Archives Initiative. This means that the Nature.com platform can now be queried by item, by title or by date range and that structured data records will be returned. All articles from over 150 titles can be accessed and dating back to 1869 for Nature magazine.  Read more