Re: The status of Semantic Web community- perspective from Scopus and Web Of Science (WOS)

I also agree with Dan here - I think it's largely due to the
non-academic hackers involvement that us academics still have new and
exciting things to write about the Semantic Web. They help cut through
the over-designed complicated solutions that academics make up, and help
pragmatic and workable solutions florish. (Danny mentions REST, which is
not the perfect example, since even the most hackish of hackers will
cite Roy Fielding's PhD thesis as the starter)

However, ranting about hackers vs. academics was not my intention:

For a nice example on how understanding history through citation gets it
 wrong, see:

The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote
by David Dubin
Library Trends, 2004.


- Gunnar


> ****
> people have lots of citations to their credit when they have scores of
> students who are obliged to cite
> their professors, or lots of friends who reciprocate,  it does not mean
> that the paper cited are necessarily  good ones
> thats a fact about citation life
> ***
> 
> so, if we were to tell the story of the SW only from that paper, i agree
> it would be misleading
> 
> as long as nobody believes that the truth about something can be
> contained in any single analysis
> 
> 
> I am interested in reality as a view, because thats all we get, anyway,
> no matter what
> 
> (it can be a better view)
> 
> i am going through a similar dilemma in my research, ca I really provide
> the state of the art in any given subject
> simply by looking at academic literature of it? that would be foolish
> (thats what they like to believe in universities)
> 
> no - to begin to have a state of the art, I have to talk to people, and
> take a good look around various sources and repositories
> 
> 
> there are methodological validity considerations of course in such a paper
> the research question for me is: how valid are all partial views of the
> world?
> 
> it says 'accepted for pubilcation', does it mean there is still time to
> make some corrections?
> 
> some statement about the limitations of the approach, plus additional
> considerations and context provided
> by this community and Dans post, could help make the paper an
> interesting contribution in itself
> both as a statistical analysis /account and in contrast to reality as
> observed outside from literature
> 
> a proof that once again some facts can all be true, but unless the
> picture is 'complete'.... can be misleading
> 
> my inclination would be to try to add a couple of layers of context at
> the intro and conclusions
> 
> I dont like to see efforts go to waste, however partial
> 
> best
> 
> 
> PDM
> 
> 
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 7:12 PM, Jeremy Carroll <jeremy@topquadrant.com
> <mailto:jeremy@topquadrant.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
>         However it did not leave any footprint in the academic
>         literature. We
>         might ask why. Like much of the work around W3C and tech industry
>         standards, the artifacts it left behind don't often show up in the
>         citation databases. A white paper here, a Web-based specification
>         there, ... it's influence cannot easily be measured through academic
>         citation patterns, despite the fact that without it, the vast
>         majority
>         of papers mentioned in
>         http://info.slis.indiana.edu/~dingying/Publication/JIS-1098-v4.pdf
>         <http://info.slis.indiana.edu/%7Edingying/Publication/JIS-1098-v4.pdf>
>         would never have existed.
> 
> 
>          
> 
> 
>     IIRC there was an explicit proposal by an earlier European paper (I
>     think with Fensel as an author) to align some academic work with the
>     W3C effort, essentially to provide branding, name recognition and a
>     transfer path for the academic work
> 
>     Maybe:
> 
>     OIL: Ontology Infrastructure to Enable the Semantic Web
>     Dieter Fensel 1, Ian Horrocks 2, Frank van Harmelen 1, Deborah
>     McGuinness 3, and
>     Peter F. Patel-Schneider 4
> 
>     "Given the current dominance and
>     importance of the WWW, a syntax of an ontology exchange language
>     must be formulated using
>     existing web standards for information representation."
> 
>     Ying Ding's paper suffers from excluding technical papers such as
>     W3C recs. These are widely cited, typically moreso than academic
>     work. They also have better review process than academic stuff.
> 
>     I tend to agree with Dan that her work misrepresents what really
>     happened.
> 
> 
>     Jeremy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Paola Di Maio
> **************************************************
> “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
> Albert Einstein
> **************************************************
>

Received on Monday, 15 February 2010 10:57:06 UTC