Re: Final CFP: In-Use Track ISWC 2013

On 05/02/2013 08:12 AM, Paul Groth wrote:
> As you know, the community produces the semantic web dogfood site
> that contains Linked Data about the papers published by the
> community's conferences and workshops. This refers to that.

Thanks.

> I thought my response and Carsten's  addressed your email with
> respect to LISC. There was also a very long thread appearing
> afterwards talking about the various aspects to this around
> publication formats. I think you have to acknowledge that there are
> disagreements with your position with respect to technology for
> publication.

The disagreements that you speak of are completely off topic.

The core of the discussion is to have plain old simple HTML welcomed. 
Maybe I've miscommunicated that at some point. It is really not a debate 
around whether to use HTML5 or XHTML or whichever accompanying semantic 
representations for the data, and being a show-stopper. It is pretty 
much a matter of fact that there is a difference of opinion on that, and 
it is not going to be resolved in the near future. Trying to resolve 
that is not the best use of our time. Those that want to go for it, no 
one is stopping them.

At the end, it really doesn't make a difference any way which (X)HTML to 
use when our goal is a compromise: 1) use some HTML + CSS (with style 
guide requested) 2) get a resulting view (e.g., in PDF) that's fairly 
consistent. That's something important that we can accomplish. It 
doesn't matter if it is also accompanied with RDFa, Microdata, 
miroformats - the community can sort that out as they wish.

See also example responses [1] [2] [3] [4] that's trying to keep it focused.

Here is one proof of concept [5].

> I don't know why your pessimistic - we are publishing rdf data about
> our publications , more authors are providing links to code and data
> sources, we have open access forums for our papers. Journals like SWJ
> are experimenting with new forms of peer review.

Those are all important but different issues.

If someone is doing "science", it goes without saying that the data 
needs to be provided as well as a clear path to reproducing the same 
results. And the possibility to communicate due to open access to that 
knowledge. That's not some feature that SW/LD community invented and 
lets not get over ourselves by pretending to have something remarkable 
in place. It is the minimum requirement for sciences. No source code? 
Cya! Any barrier to acquire that knowledge? Cya!

Lets be clear on "we are publishing rdf data about our publications". It 
is exactly that; "about" it. There goes an opportunity to have countless 
invaluable structured statements. Paper after paper. Even if some RDF is 
stuffed into PDF, c'mon, that's a total hack as far as LD is concerned 
and is mostly metadata. We should aim higher in that regard.

> The linked data community is full of experiments and great stuff to
> do better science.

If you want to participate in an experiment, *please*, welcome a flavour 
of HTML and if the committee wants, their favourite structured formats. 
That would mean a lot. Some other track, journal or workshop can do 
their own thing as long as we have a base like HTML.

If you can't do that, I would like to learn about the main reason and 
not off-track on minute discussion points given the big picture. 
Whatever it is, I want a fix and make it happen.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2013Apr/0376.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2013Apr/0318.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2013Apr/0346.html
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2013May/0023.html
[5] https://github.com/csarven/linked-research

-Sarven