Personal experience in HTML-based scholarly submissions

Hi all,

I'm Silvio Peroni from the University of Bologna. First of all, I would like to say that I'm really excited about this new community group, and I hope we will produce some useful guidelines for facilitating the creation of fully HTML-based scholarly articles.

I would like to share with you my personal experience in using HTML as a format for preparing/submitting/processing papers in scientific events.

I am one of the main developer of RASH (https://github.com/essepuntato/rash), i.e., a markup language that restricts the use of HTML elements to only 31 elements for writing academic research articles, and that strictly follows the Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 [1] for expressing structural semantics on various markup elements used. The RASH documentation is available online [2] and documents RASH version 0.4, defined as a RelaxNG grammar [3].

In addition, RASH is entirely based on a strong theory on structural patterns for XML documents [4], which has been already adopted and followed by existing standards for document markup such as the OASIS LegalDocumentXML Specs (a.k.a., Akoma Ntoso) [5]. Note that the systematic use of these structural patterns is an added value in all stages of the documents' lifecycle: they can be guidelines for creating well-engineered documents and vocabularies, rules to extract structural components from legacy documents, indicators to study to what extent documents share design principles and community guidelines.

RASH has been already proposed as one of the possible formats for HTML submissions in several academic events, listed in [6]. For instance, the sources of some of RASH accepted papers are available in the workshop program webpage [7].

Finally, RASH is accompanied by a series of tools, that form the RASH Framework, for helping the creation/conversion/enrichment of such documents from/into different formats. A brief description of the whole RASH Framework has been presented during the poster and demo session of the earliest International Semantic Web Conference (http://iswc2015.semanticweb.org/), and the related article is freely available in RASH and PDF [8].

OK, I think that's all.
Have a nice day :-)

S.


# References
1. Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0, W3C Editor's Draft 26 November 2015. https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/dpub.html
2. RASH: Research Articles in Simplified HTML, Documentation - Version 0.4.1, November 5, 2015. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/documentation/index.html
3. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/grammar/rash.rng
4. Di Iorio, A., Peroni, S., Poggi, F., & Vitali, F. (2014). Dealing with structural patterns of XML documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 65(9): 1884–1900. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.23088 (OA at http://speroni.web.cs.unibo.it/publications/di-iorio-2014-dealing-with-structural.pdf)
5. https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml
6. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/#venues-that-have-adopted-rash-as-submission-format
7. http://cs.unibo.it/save-sd/2015/program.html
8. 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). Available in RASH (https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/papers/rash-demo-iswc2015.html) and PDF (https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/papers/rash-demo-iswc2015.pdf)



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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