In the long run, the most memorable event of 1989 will probably be that Tim Berners-Lee hacked up the HTTP protocol and named the result the "World Wide Web." Tim

Billions of humans will use the Web over the next decade, yet very few of those people are in a position to define what is “the Web” and what isn’t.

The ‘Archival Exchange Format’ has been standardized by SMPTE with participants from organizations including Disney, Universal and the Library of Congress

Table of Contents for Recommended Formats Statement (RFS).  RFS identifies analog and digital formats suitable for the large-scale acquisition of and long-term access to library collections.  The identified formats have been selected to maximize the preservation and accessibility of creative content into the future.

We have stuff. We use standards to talk about it, and you can too. Here's how. (Context: "augmented reality")

Recently, experts working on ORCID and ISNI, both ISO-standard identifiers, spoke with one of the founders of schema.org to facilitate their use as embedded persona references, particularly through extensions such as BibExtend.

Minimum Digitization Capture Recommendations The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section June 2013 Submitted by: Ian Bogus, University of

On Monday, the W3C announced that its Director, Tim Berners-Lee, had determined that the "playback of protected content" was in scope for the W3C HTML Working Group's new charter, overriding EFF's

NSA infiltrating standards bodies to get encryption weakened, as well as putting moles in telcos and ISPs. Greeeeeeeeeeeat.

Experts see increased collaboration as a step toward technological progress.

Office 2013 will, after years, finally fully support Open Document Format, Adobe's PDF, and, oh yes, Microsoft's own Open XML document standard.

I often go on about how software applications often diverge from, or uniquely implement, documented standards for formatting files that they create. Some software vendors are aware of, and document these deviations. Adobe are a good example of this with their software and in particular their implementation of extensions in writing files that adhere to the PDF version 1.7 formatting standard. Below is an extract from the wikipedia entry on PDF with my emphasis in italics at the bottom:   “Adobe’s PDF specifications    Adobe changed the PDF specification several times and continues to develop new specifications with new versions of Adobe Acrobat. There have been nine versions of PDF with corresponding Acrobat releases:[10]      (1993) – PDF 1.0 / Acrobat 1.0    (1994) – PDF 1.1 / Acrobat 2.0    (1996) – PDF 1.2 / Acrobat 3.0    (1999) – PDF 1.3 / Acrobat 4.0    (2001) – PDF 1.4 / Acrobat 5.0    (2003) – PDF 1.5 / Acrobat 6.0    (2005) – PDF 1.6 / Acrobat 7.0    (2006) – PDF 1.7 / Acrobat 8.0    (2008) – PDF 1.7, Adobe Extension Level 3 / Acrobat 9.0    (2009) – PDF 1.7, Adobe Extension Level 5 / Acrobat 9.1     The ISO standard ISO 32000-1:2008 is equivalent to Adobe’s PDF 1.7. Adobe declared that it is not producing a PDF 1.8 Reference. The future versions of the PDF Specification will be produced by ISO technical committees. However, Adobe published documents specifying what extended features for PDF, beyond ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7), are supported in its newly released products. This makes use of the extensibility features of PDF as documented in ISO 32000-1 in Annex E. Adobe declared all extended features in Adobe Extension Level 3 and 5 have been accepted for a new proposal of ISO 32000-2 (a.k.a. PDF 2.0).[11]    The specifications for PDF are backward inclusive. The PDF 1.7 specification includes all of the functionality previously documented in the Adobe PDF Specifications for versions 1.0 through 1.6. Where Adobe removed certain features of PDF from their standard, they too are not contained in ISO 32000-1.[1]    PDF documents conforming to ISO 32000-1 carry the PDF version number 1.7. Documents containing Adobe extended features still carry the PDF base version number 1.7 but also contain an indication of which extension was followed during document creation.”   I added the emphasis to make a point. For understanding how files are internally structured it is not always enough to just know the formatting standard adhered to when files were created (e.g. PDF version 1.7). Sometimes we need more information about how the particular application chose to interpret or, as in the example above, implement the standard. This information could be represented in many cases simply by knowing what the creating application was. This is shown/implicitly acknowledged in the Wikipedia extract by the inclusion of the application association with the name of each PDF version listed in the list of versions.

When taking an unprepared approach, the process of creating an eBook can have some undesirable effects on your publications due to automation tools and processes and dated materials that may or may not be in a digital format. Add to that the complexity of multiple devices and formats and you can have a disaster in […]

More DDI data, this time DDI3.

Excellent real-world example of DDI use.

The ISA Commons is a growing community that uses the ISA metadata tracking framework to facilitate standards-compliant collection, curation, management and reuse of datasets in an increasingly diverse set of life science domains.