Given that most people reading this probably also read the UsefulChem Blog I would guess that they have already figured out I am visiting the States. However as I am now here and due to jet lag have a few hours to kill before breakfast I thougt I might detail the intinerary for anyone interested. Currently I am in Gaithersburg at the CanSAS V meeting.

I am in the process of preparing the talk I am giving at Drexel next month and have been going over the early versions of our Lab Blog and getting a clearer picture of how our usage has evolved. I wanted to record this so will write some notes as I go. To re-iterate our key aims were to capture and record the data and to make it available in a way that would allow machine processing.

Continuing on this theme of embedded metadata, this is one reason why DNA barcodingis so appealing. A DNA barcode is rather like embedded metadata -- once we extract it we can look up the sequence and determine the organism's identity (or, at least whether we've seen it before). It's very like identifying a CD based on a hash computed from the track lengths.

Following on from the previous post, as Howison and Goodrum note, Adobe provides XMP as a way to store metadata in files, such as PDFs. XMP supports RDF and namespaces, which means widely used bibliographic standards such as Dublin Core and PRISM can be embedded in a PDF, so the article doesn't become separated from its metadata.