Re: A request for conference organizers and promoters

Hi,

I think the main issue is not strictly the format, but to start to offer an alternative to a system that often forces you to go via pdf.
At the moments standards are basically coming from publishers!
We should be able to force them to accept what people want to submit in, at some point...
As Sarven says, it is a reasonable step for the SW community  to publish via standards they work on.

best,
Andrea

Il giorno 01/mag/2013, alle ore 17:16, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> ha scritto:

> On 05/01/2013 05:13 PM, Harry Halpin wrote:
>> As is well-known, (X)HTML+RDFa as a conference proceeding format has
>> failed due to links, inability to make conformant (X)HTML, and RDFa
>> being generally hard to write.
>> 
>> I think ePub (HTML5 profile) will solve these, and when that is more
>> mature, I'd be happy to switch conferences I'm co-chairing to a ePub or
>> HTML5 format. Sorry, but not (X)HTML+RDFa for reasons Ivan, Daniel, and
>> others mentioned.We'd also need good conversion tools between ePub/HTML5
>> and PDF, but I think those will happen quickly given the market demand
>> around PDF and ePub, a market demand that does not exist for (X)HTML+RDFa.
>> 
>> 
>> (typed as chairing WebSci 2013).
> 
> Hi Harry. The discussion in general at hand (see other threads leading to this [1]) over the course of the week is in two fold:
> 
> * Getting SW/LD conferences to put their share by allowing Web friendly formats as an alternative to PDF.
> 
> * Authors publishing their work as allowed. Nothing stops them from continuing in their preferred ways.
> 
> Primary mission: Eating Our Own Dogfood.
> 
> I'm going to quote Bernadette Hyland (I'm sure she wouldn't mind) because she put our shared thoughts on this as eloquently as possible off list and credit is where is due:
> 
> "if *we* in the greater engineering & scientific communities don't grock the value of structured content to improve discovery & access, how can we *ever* expect government stakeholders & the general public to value what you get with a bit of extra effort (i.e., adding structured data / consuming structured data)."
> 
> 
> So, we are not even remotely trying to cover all marketplaces, all research material, all whatevers. Just the immediate SW/LD folks to start with.
> 
> I have a difficult time accepting or at least hearing the claim that (X)HTML(+RDFa) is difficult to write and it has failed. It is a turn-off. a First, I'd love to see some survey results or something equivalent of that to back that up. Hence, I proposed [2]. Second, is /paragraph really simpler than <p> ? Is TeX really simpler than HTML? Third, whatever the issue is, we can work towards improving it as opposed to throwing our hands up in the air, claiming that chaos is in charge and walking away from the problem.
> 
> So, I would argue that it is not our abilities that's keeping us behind, but our laziness, carelessness, and our blind obedience.
> 
> Really glad that you've raised ePub (HTML5) as a possibility. And, I'd love to hear more about the market aspect if you can further share your thoughts.
> 
> To wrap it up, the discussion is not whether if RDFa or some other flavour of RDF serialization, or Microdata or microformats, is best fit, but it is about at least getting HTML in there. Can we at least focus on welcoming that as a first-class format as far as SW/LD community is concerned? I would say that would be a gigantic leap from demanding LaTeX/PDF.
> 
> IMHO, we need to do more of "okay, lets go for X which is reasonable enough and figure out the rest along the way" as opposed to "how about this? how about this? how about this? nope, not perfect. lets talk in 5 years"
> 
> Conferences do their part: welcome it.
> 
> Authors: put in the effort!
> 
> This is ours and we need work towards it. And, this has been put off way too long and incredibly disappointing to see us running ourselves into a wall year after year. However long it will take us, lets just friggin' start.
> 
> We are able to output HTML+CSS to PDF with LNCS/ACM SIG styles to a reasonable degree. We can perfect it if we need to whatever quality that we set ourselves up to. IMO, here is one modest start [3]. Lets get something along those lines going for authors, so that reviewers see a consistent view of papers (whether they originate from HTML or TeX). Consequently, we might actually get some structured data out of it and who knows, by some miracle, we might even have these actually end up on a standard looking webpage and point at it from other places. One might say "woah, can we also get free reviewers from the Web (society) at large by having a simple comment system on the webpage too?"
> 
> You know, all hippie dippy stuff.
> 
> (Typed with a smiley face)
> 
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2013Apr/0291.html
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2013Apr/0347.html
> [3] https://github.com/csarven/linked-research
> 
> -Sarven
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 May 2013 22:49:52 UTC