Re: The status of Semantic Web community- perspective from Scopus and Web Of Science (WOS)

> Dan Brickley wrote:
>> However it did not leave any footprint in the academic literature. We
>> might ask why. Like much of the work around W3C and tech industry
>> standards, the artifacts it left behind don't often show up in the
>> citation databases. A white paper here, a Web-based specification
>> there, ... it's influence cannot easily be measured through academic
>> citation patterns, despite the fact that without it, the vast majority
>> of papers mentioned in
>> http://info.slis.indiana.edu/~dingying/Publication/JIS-1098-v4.pdf
>> would never have existed.

Btw, last summer at the ESWC SPOT2009 workshop Matthew Rowe and Jonathan Butters presented a paper that took into account online documents (blogs, standards, ), as well as the academic pdf based publishing to glean a global social network. "Assessing Trust: Contextual Accountability" is available here:

  http://spot.semanticweb.org/2009/

As far as trying to relate both spaces, this is a good piece of work. It is clear that one needs to look at the global information systems to get a coherent view.

I do agree with Danbri that standard based documents go through a lot more review than academic papers. Having these online and linkable also means they can be a lot more influential. Even more so if the ideas are implemented in real useable software. 

Just to give a minor example: The Atom XML IETF standard I participated in developing was the culmination of years of development on RSS work. The group spent 2 years working out the details of the wording of that document. This then was incorporated into software used by millions of people. 

And for some reason a lot of Academic papers fail to cite web based standards, blogs or other places where ideas may have emerged.

Henry

Received on Sunday, 14 February 2010 10:27:05 UTC