COinS

ContextObjects in Spans (COinS) is a method to embed bibliographic metadata in the HTML code of web pages.

In late 2004, Richard Cameron, the creator of CiteULike, drew attention to the need for a standard way of embedding metadata in HTML pages.

[4] Embedding OpenURL ContextObjects in HTML had been proposed before by Herbert Van de Sompel and Oren Beit-Arie[5] and a working paper by Chudnov and Jeremy Frumkin.

[10] The ContextObject implementation guidelines of COinS include four publication types (article with several subtypes, book, patent, and generic) and a couple of simple fields.

However, the guidelines are not required part of COinS, so the standard does not provide a strict metadata model like Dublin Core or the Bibliographic Ontology.