[uf-discuss] OpenURL COinS

[C. Hudley]

On 3/24/06, Andy Mabbett <andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
>
> Is "OpenURL COinS" <http://ocoins.info/> a microformat? How widely used
> is it? are there any alternative/ competing formats?

It is not yet widely used.  The most important example of COinS in the
wild is OpenWorldCat, which is integrated with google, google scholar,
and yahoo search:

  http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000968.html
  http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/tryit/default.htm
  http://www.oclc.org/productworks/coins.htm

The Structured Blogging plugins also publish COinS for books and
journal articles:

  http://structuredblogging.org/

...so anyone using those to write about books w/ISBNs and articles is
publishing COinS.

OpenURL itself is widely implemented in the STM (science, technical,
medical) publishing community and in medium-to-large libraries.

Brian's explanations of COinS not being a microformat is correct; the
data inside the COinS is indeed hidden from the microformats.org
perspective.  In a way, though, the COinS convention is like a
microformat for publishing an OpenURL, however opaque OpenURL might
seem.  Which, however unsatisfactory this explanation might be to
participants of this list, is why we wrote it.

A workable citation microformat easily serialized into / deserialized
from OpenURLs would be much better.


--
C. Hudley
We Know The Truth, Inc.