Re: Publication of scientific research

Well,

I think turtle is very is a a generic language to "write data".
But many people are not even used to a computational language at all... the typical interface for "data" typically being an excel spreadsheet.
At the end, it's in a good part a question of tools that meet users typical practices.

The other good part is actually a question of incentives.
Now we can open an historical digression on how in life sciences some publishers have been functional to use of public repositories for data. The same mechanism could work for embedding metadata (if there is a need or incentive, tools come).

Yes another bit, I was just wondering: are we sure that authors embedding metadata in their papers is the best way to go ? They surely know most about their data, but may get shorts of standards and even have some bias. It looks like a (modern) role for publishers could be to actually put order in metadata provided by  users.

best,
Andrea 


Il giorno 25/apr/2013, alle ore 11:57, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> ha scritto:

> On 4/25/13 2:05 AM, Ivan Herman wrote:
>> As for the metadata: I think even turtle is too complicated for many (sorry Kingsley). I am not talking about the average readers of this list; I am talking about authors in other disciplines. But, if we bite the bullet and we say that papers are submitted in PDF, we could at least require to include the metadata in the PDF file. After all, the metadata is included in PDF in XMP format, which is (a slightly ugly and restricted version of) RDF/XML. It is ugly, but we have enough tools around to turn it into Turtle, or JSON-LD, or whatever.
> 
> Believe me, I used to believe that Turtle was too complicated for the casual user. By that I mean a literate individual (in any natural language) that would like to use the "scribble" approach to data creation, integration, and publication.
> 
> The user profile I have in mind certainly isn't scoped to this or any list associated with Linked Data or the the broader Semantic Web etc..
> 
> Prefixes and absolute URIs are the two things that create the illusion of Turtle being complex.
> 
> I arrived at my conclusions by testing my theory against a whole range of profiles - kids, teenagers, and adults.
> 
> Once I dropped prefixes and absolute URIs from the introduction it was smooth sailing. Remember, across all natural languages underlies a form of subject-predicate-object or subject-verb-object sentence structure. Thus, <#this> <#relatesTo> <#that> etc.. becomes easy to understand.
> 
> Remember the claim I make on this very day:
> Turtle is the key to unleashing the full potential of RDF model based Linked Data that scales to the Web :-)
> 
> Note, HTML is too complicated [1], and that's why we don't have a fully functional read-write Web. All we need to do is get people to understand that a text editor is the ultimate starting tool for data curation. Once the basics of structured data curation  -- based on the RDF data model -- are understood, this new profile of data curator will then look to tools to exploit the productivity benefits that they add too the endeavor.
> 
> Links:
> 
> 1. http://bit.ly/ZJSaXP -- TimBL on the subject of HTML and its complications.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kingsley Idehen	
> Founder & CEO
> OpenLink Software
> Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2013 12:38:19 UTC