IRM10 – Help me Igor
Euan Adie from the Nature Publishing Group is taking the difficult ‘post-lunch’ session (sorry @stew). He’s talking about taking referencing into ‘non-traditional’ environments – looking at Google Wave, Blogs and Mobile.
First up, Google Wave. Nature have written a Wave plugin called ‘Help me Igor’. You invited Igor to your wave, and then you can type a command that looks like ‘cite xxx’ where ‘xxx’ is a search term or phrase. Igor finds this command and searches some sources (currently PubMed and Connotea can be used) for references that match the search terms. If it finds a result, it inserts the reference into the Wave as a numbered footnote.
Igor is proof-of-concept – but was relatively easy to code because it is using existing APIs which are documented and supply easy to parse responses (e.g. XML). Much easier to parse XML/RDF/MODS than RIS or BibTeX).
Now Euan talking about a project to collect information from blog posts etc. that link to Nature / NPG Journals. Enter a DOI and see all the posts related to that digital object. Nature Blogs support an API documented at http://blogs.nature.com/help
Finally Euan talking about Mobile devices. User cases for mobile different to those for desktop. (Sorry, missed this bit – was still thinking about Igor!)
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