Introducing RASH 0.4

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce the new version (0.4) of RASH, the Research Articles in Simplified HTML format, and of all the tools included in the RASH Framework, available at

https://github.com/essepuntato/rash

RASH is a markup language that restricts the use of HTML elements to only 31 elements for writing academic research articles. It is possible to include also RDF statements as RDFa annotations and/or as Turtle, JSON-LD and RDF/XML triples by using the tag "script". The RASH documentation is available online [1] and documents RASH version 0.4, defined as a RelaxNG grammar [2].

These are the new features that RASH 0.4 implements:

- old elements such "div" and "span" have been replaced by more appropriate and semantic-oriented elements, e.g., "section", "figure", "figcaption", "blockquote", "pre" and "code";

- the structural semantics of particular elements (e.g., sections of a specific type, such as abstract, bibliography, etc.) is now provided by means of the attribute '@role' instead of '@class', and its values are strictly compliant with the current version of the Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 [3];

- a new kind of floating box for creating text listings (that can be easily referenced within the document that contains them) has been created by means of the element "figure" with role "listingbox";

With the release of this new version, we have also made available new tools as part of the RASH Framework [4]:

- a new script, i.e., "rash-update.sh" [5], based on an XSLT document [6], that allows one to convert automatically documents written using an old version of RASH into the earliest one;

- a new Java-based application, i.e., "odt2rash.jar" [7], based on another XSLT document [8], that allows one to convert OpenOffice documents, written according to specific guidelines [9] using only basic features of OpenOffice, into RASH documents automatically;

These tools accompany the other existing ones for checking the validity of RASH documents, visualising RASH documents on browsers with two different layouts (Web-based and Springer LNCS – the latter is partially based on Linked Research [10] CCSs), for converting RASH documents into LaTeX according to the ACM ICPS [11] and Springer LNCS [12] styles, and for automatically annotate RASH elements with their actual (structural) semantics according to the Document Components Ontology (DoCO) [13].

A brief description of the whole RASH Framework has been presented during the poster and demo session of ISWC 2015 (http://iswc2015.semanticweb.org/), and the related article is freely available in RASH and PDF [14]. It is worth mentioning that RASH has been already proposed as one of the possible formats for HTML submissions in several academic events, listed in [15].

I'm looking forward to having your comments about RASH and its Framework and, in case you are already an earlier adopter of it, please feel free to participate in a 10 minutes survey about the use of RASH for writing academic papers, available at http://esurv.org/?u=rash-format.

Of course, this work could not be possible without the support and help of great people [16] who implemented several aspects of the RASH Framework. We, as developers, would also like to thank all the early adopters of RASH, and Ivan Herman who constructively provided new and effective insights into the RASH specification and who suggested several additions that have been implemented in the current version.

Please don't hesitate to contact me (email: essepuntato@gmail.com) for comments, suggestions, and further questions.

Have a nice day :-)

S.


# References

1. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/documentation/index.html
2. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/grammar/rash.rng
3. Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0, W3C Editor's Draft 30 October 2015. https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/dpub.html
4. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/blob/master/tools/
5. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/blob/master/tools/rash-update.sh
6. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/blob/master/xslt/rash-update.xsl
7. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/blob/master/tools/odt2rash/
8. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/blob/master/xslt/from-odt.xsl
9. https://rawgit.com/essepuntato/rash/master/documentation/rash-in-odt.odt
10. https://github.com/csarven/linked-research
11. http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
12. http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0
13. Constantin, A., Peroni, S., Pettifer, S., Shotton, D., Vitali, F. (in press). The Document Components Ontology (DoCO). To appear in Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press. DOI: 10.3233/SW-150177
14. 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. To appear in Proceedings of the poster and demo session of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2015). Preprint 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)
15. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/#venues-that-have-adopted-rash-as-submission-format
16. https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/graphs/contributors


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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