Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 10:03:19 +0530 From: Farooque Shaheen <Farooque.Shaheen@caritor.com> Some Web visionaries have concocted a scheme to embed complete citation information in Web pages. Inspired by U.K. researcher Dan Chudnov and other innovators, Eric Hellman, Ross Singer, and others have invented COinS, which is short for ?ContextObject in Span.? (?Span? refers to the HTML tag used to embed COinS metadata.) The team has created a specification and defined it at http://ocoins.info. COinS seeks to address a fundamental problem: Imagine you are searching Google Scholar or a blog or a random Web site, and you find a citation to an article that is critical to your work. The article isn?t freely available on the Web, but it is syndicated to one or more full-text resources. You are affiliated with a company or a university that has licensed the journal for online delivery via a content aggregator. You just want to click on the citation and see the full text of the article; you don?t want to have to go to your library?s home page and start your search all over again. COinS is an attempt to address this problem. COinS allows content providers to publish sufficient metadata so that you can click on a hyperlink and (assuming your local institution has licensed a database that includes the journal in its collection) seamlessly download the full text of the article in question. The OpenURL standard defines a scheme to transport metadata about a cited work?author, title, etc.?over the Web. COinS defines a way for a Web content provider to embed bibliographic metadata into an HTML document. Last week, Openly Informatics announced an implementation of COinS as a plug-in to the Firefox browser. If a user visits a Web site that has a COinS-compliant citation, the plug-in allows the user to retrieve the relevant article from the locally licensed database with a click or two. The new plug-in is available at http://www.openly.com/openurlref and is compatible with Google Scholar. Source: http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb050801-1.shtml Thanks & Regards, Farooque Shaheen, Caritor India Pvt Ltd. Tel. 080-26678388 # 4105 Mobile-9342507449