RASH version 0.5: less roles, LaTeX formulas, and ROCS

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce the new version (0.5) of RASH, the Research Articles in Simplified HTML format, and of all the tools included in the RASH Framework, available at

https://github.com/essepuntato/rash

RASH is a markup language that restricts the use of HTML elements to only 32 elements for writing academic research articles. It is possible to include also RDF statements as RDFa annotations and/or as Turtle, JSON-LD and RDF/XML triples by using the tag "script". The RASH documentation is available online [1] and documents RASH version 0.5, defined as a RelaxNG grammar [2].

These are the new features that RASH 0.5 implements:

- the elements "i" and "b" have been replaced by "em" and "strong" respectively (thanks Ruben Verborgh for this);

- the non-standard roles specifiable for the element "figure", i.e., "figurebox", "tablebox", "listingbox", and "formulabox", have been removed, while their correct visualisation and conversion is still guaranteed by looking at the actual elements such element "figure" contains;

- all the roles for internal references (i.e., "ref", "doc-noteref", and "doc-biblioref") have been removed and substituted by using an empty element "a" linking to the element one wants to refer to (e.g., a section, a figure, a footnote, a bibliographic reference);

- the element "img" can have the role "math" specified if it actually represents a mathematical formula;

- the element "span", with the attribute "role" set to "math", can be used to include LaTeX formulas within a RASH document;

- added the support for MathJax so as to render correctly both LaTeX and MathML formulas in all browsers;

- added the support for SVG (element "svg") for specifying images.

Among the tools of the RASH Framework [3], with the release of this new version we have also made available the RASH Online Conversion Service (ROCS) [4,5], i.e., a Python web application based on web.py that allows one to convert an ODT document written according to simple guidelines [6] into RASH, and from RASH documents into LaTeX ones compliant with the Springer LNCS LaTeX class and ACM ICPS class. An online version of ROCS is also available at

http://dasplab.cs.unibo.it/rocs

A brief description of the whole RASH Framework has been presented during the poster and demo session of ISWC 2015 (http://iswc2015.semanticweb.org/), and the related article is freely available in RASH and PDF [7]. It is worth mentioning that RASH has been already proposed as one of the possible formats for HTML submissions in several academic events, listed in [8].

I'm looking forward to having your comments about RASH and its Framework and, in case you are already an earlier adopter of it, please feel free to participate in a 10 minutes survey about the use of RASH for writing academic papers, available at http://esurv.org/?u=rash-format.

Of course, this work could not be possible without the support and help of great people [9] who implemented several aspects of the RASH Framework. We, as developers, would also like to thank all the early adopters of RASH, and Ivan Herman who constructively provided new and effective insights into the RASH specification and who suggested several additions that have been implemented in the current version.

Please don't hesitate to contact me (email: essepuntato@gmail.com) for comments, suggestions, and further questions.

Have a nice day :-)

S.


# References

1. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/documentation/index.html
2. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/grammar/rash.rng
3. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/blob/master/tools/
4. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/blob/master/tools/rocs/
5. Di Iorio, A., Gonzalez-Beltran, A. G., Osborne, F., Peroni, S., Poggi, F., Vitali, F. (2016). It ROCS! The RASH Online Conversion Service. To appear in the Companion Volume of the Proceedings of the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016). https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/papers/rash-poster-www2016.html
6. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/documentation/rash-in-odt.odt
7. Di Iorio, A., Nuzzolese, A. G., Osborne, F., Peroni, S., Poggi, F., Smith, M., Vitali, F. Zhao, J. (2015). The RASH Framework: enabling HTML+RDF submissions in scholarly venues. In Proceedings of the poster and demo session of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2015). https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/papers/rash-demo-iswc2015.html
8. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/#venues-that-have-adopted-rash-as-submission-format
9. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/graphs/contributors


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Silvio Peroni, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
Tel: +39 051 2094871
E-mail: silvio.peroni@unibo.it
Web: http://www.essepuntato.it
Twitter: essepuntato