Re: Publication of scientific research (was: CfP: 3rd International Workshop on Linked Science 2013 (LISC2013))

On 04/23/2013 11:52 PM, Paul Groth wrote:
> As an organizer of both this workshop and one called the Beyond the
> PDF force11.org/beyondthepdf2 - I'll respond.
>
> There's nothing particularly wrong with PDF as a means of
> encapsulating human readable information so asking for submissions
> this way seems suitable. (Yes there are downsides to the format and
> maybe we would should be more liberal in terms of formats). pdf also
> has facilities for embedding metadata in rdf.

Make is so!?

What's stopping the conference/workshop organizers from making that 
change? Why not the other way around?

If the organizers request the research work to be submitted using Web 
native technologies e.g., (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MathML, SVG, and 
yes, RDF, what do you think will happen?

Make the change and people will follow like they always do. How am I so 
sure about that? Because authors want to get their degrees and/or 
recognized in the field. So, they'll do what's necessary.

The point is that, you have some responsibility - pardon me for saying 
that, but I can't resist - to ask for the works in Web friendly formats 
as the primary format.

What I imagine will happen is that, in the short term, some people are 
going to whine about it because it is not what they are used. Boohoo; 
computers are hard. They want to continue writing /paragraph instead of 
<p> (to put it in a nutshell).

> I would hope that the submissions to the workshop are the text around
> lots of links to both source code repositories and linked data
> sources - that's the true test

I beg to differ. I think folks are interested in different things. I'm 
sure you would agree that there is a lot of value in research analysis 
for different parties. For example, I want to write a query to compare 
the claims (findings, or results) of different research that's 
conducted. Among many insights that one could obtain, gathering 
statistical data on that tells me what we are doing, how fast we are 
going, and where to focus next etc. How do we do that in PDF again (or 
from the hacked up RDF metadata within)? We have the technologies at our 
disposal, yet, for all intents and purposes we are going in the opposite 
direction and making it more difficult than necessary to do some "Linked 
Science" and alike.

Paul, I'm not singling you (or other organizers) out - and like many, I 
respect your contributions. We have a recurring issue at hand (at least 
in my eyes; as I sound like an old broken record in these mailing lists) 
in the Semantic Web / Linked Data community. And, the hold-back is not 
only from conferences/workshops. Authors in this community need to take 
responsibility and make their contributions by eating their own dogfood 
(or well, the Web standards that they buy in to). Supervisors, academia, 
or funding bodies should be encouraging the same efforts. That's when we 
are all on the same page.

If you want to make a change, make it so! You don't need anyone's 
permission. :)

-Sarven