Re: html for scholarly communication: RASH, Scholarly HTML or Dokieli?

Hi Johannes,

> at Fidus Writer [1] we are about ready to convert from our basic HTML exporter to one of the standards. As I understand it, there are currently three standards out there that more or less aim to do the same thing: RASH [2], Scholarly HTML [3], and Dokieli [4]. We had thought we would go for Scholarly HTML, but now I am not sure if it is being maintained at all any more. Is there a reason why we have three different formats for this? Are we moving toward just one, or do they have different purposes? 

I’m answering mainly from my side (RASH) – but I’ve added Sarven and Ivan into the discussion, so as to have more precise responses about Scholarly HTML and Dokieli respectively.

You can find more information about RASH at https://w3id.org/people/essepuntato/papers/rash-peerj2016.html <https://w3id.org/people/essepuntato/papers/rash-peerj2016.html> (an article about it that has been recently accepted at PeerJ CS). In particular, RASH restricts the use of HTML elements to only 32 elements for writing academic research articles. It allows authors to use embedded RDF annotations. In addition, RASH strictly follows the Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 for expressing structural semantics on various markup elements used. In addition, RASH comes with a Framework that add additional functionalities (e.g. converters from/to different formats – e.g. ODT, DOCX, LaTeX, EPUB (to come) – for simplifying authors and other actors during their typical scholarly communication tasks (e.g. submitting papers to a conference in a particular format).

Please don’t hesitate to write me for additional information about RASH and its Framework. I would be great to have a RASH exporter on Fidus Writer indeed.

Just to clarify: RASH and Scholarly HTML are basically specifying a particular use of HTML for writing a scholarly document – thus they can be considered HTML-based formats. Dokieli is an HTML editor like Fidus Writer, it is not a format, and has the advantage of being developed following Solid, Linked Data Notification, and other (Semantic) Web standards and scholarly communication principles (see Linked Research at https://linkedresearch.org <https://linkedresearch.org/>) – I think that Sarven can provide you more detail here. As far as I know, I have no news about further developments of Scholarly HTML.

> Also, I see that RASH and Dokieli allow metadata to be added in a variety of different formats. I wonder if one of the ways is the recommended way to ensure that other tools can work with the data later on?

Yes, they both leave the freedom to the user to adopt any vocabulary she prefers. I would suggest to use Schema.org <http://schema.org/> and, if you need more explicit and precise semantic definition of things, SPAR Ontologies (http://www.sparontologies.net <http://www.sparontologies.net/>) – disclosure: I’m one of the creator of SPAR Ontologies.

I hope it may help.
Have a nice day :-)

S.




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Silvio Peroni, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
Tel: +39 051 2095393
E-mail: silvio.peroni@unibo.it
Web: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/silvio.peroni/en
Twitter: essepuntato