- normalise all the identifiers - URLs, PMIDs and DOIs - relating to papers, and
- collect together the conversations around a paper from all the various academic, news, blog and other discussion channels.
And it is: with the APIs from ask.connotea, Connotea, Postgenomic, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef you can pull together a fair amount of information relating to discussions, bookmarks and citations of a paper identified by either URL, PMID or DOI.
Here's the form to enter a URL, and here's the discussion for the paper that Jon used as an example, identified by URL, DOI or PMID.
(It's having to call quite a few APIs sequentially, so give it a little while to return the results).
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TODO: Pull in comments attached to papers on publishers' sites; use Lucene indexes of PubMed to match press releases to published papers; show more of the PubMed and Postgenomic conversation and citation graphs; fetch shared annotations from Zotero.
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Update: Added Bloglines and del.icio.us APIs, but those won't work so well because they don't normalise the URIs.