Introduction

Hi all, and welcome to the group!

I am very happy to see that some of you jumped right in and started
talking right away. No doubt your experience will match mine: whenever
you're at one of those fancy cocktail parties (which I'm sure is very
often) and mention your interest in rendering scholarly interchange more
interoperable, it is a good day (or more likely good champagne) if you
can elicit so much as a polite nod in return. But the small group of us
who actually care about the topic tend to be quite passionate about it —
and that's all we need!

Ivan was right about my being busy with turkey-related matters, but I
also wanted to give folks a chance to join the group before speaking up.
Note that if you haven't seen a message from Johannes[0], then you've
missed some posts. Not a problem: there's an archive[1].

Quick personal intro: my name is Robin Berjon, I've worked on a bunch of
standards (HTML, SVG, device APIs, binary XML, and then a few more) and
I'm getting very close to two decades spent doing things to Web content,
often with JavaScript. I work for Standard Analytics
(http://standardanalytics.io/), specifically on https://science.ai/. Not
much to see there yet, more coming soon.

One of the things we built is this: http://scholarly.vernacular.io/. Our
goal with that is simple. We want to do all manners of smart and
interesting things with the scholarly literature, but it is almost
universally published (and produced) in the worst possible formats.
Where the formats are usable, they tend to be fragmented. Or they can't
easily be extended to support interesting variants without breaking.

What we started hashing out with our "Scholarly HTML" was a format able
to make the interchange of scholarly information part of the plumbing,
something that just works without you even thinking about it, so that
all of those who want to innovate in that area can dedicate their energy
to the actually innovative parts rather than to banging your head
against the spectacularly asinine manner in which Word stores footnotes.

This is not something we want to own, and as you all know this is a
problem that many would like to solve — hence this group. Note: I made
myself chair of the group because I have extensive experience chairing,
and CGs that aren't pushed tend to wither and die. It's not a power-play
(if you've chaired a W3C group before, you know that's not where the
real power lies :). Either way, if you're not happy with anything I'm
doing, just kick me out. I'm happy to use the WICG's process for that:
https://wicg.github.io/admin/charter.html#chairs.

Having cleared the intro, I will send more specific emails on other
details so you can cherry pick which you're interested in.

Let's have some scholarly fun!


[0]
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-scholarlyhtml/2015Nov/0000.html
[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-scholarlyhtml/

-- 
• Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
• http://science.ai/ — intelligent science publishing
•

Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2015 04:13:54 UTC