The ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry is an experiment. We intend to demonstrate how modern web technologies can be used to dramatically enhance the type of information that can be communicated using web-based tools over standard online publishing approaches.
The idea is fascinating and one I have wondered about in the past. If enough publication add semi-structured, or structured, metadata in their content (one reason PDF is not a good mechanism) then you suddenly truly have publications sitting on the programmable web, ready to be mined. My guess is that as time goes on, we will start seeing richer markup on blogs, wikis and general web sites, allowing topic specific search engines and spiders to pull in information. Perhaps more importantly, you can combine this with dictionaries and non-scientific sources to present information rich in content. The question I have is how noisy will this get? I suppose it depends on our filters and ranking algorithms, which will be tasked with building in relevance into results.
Getting back to the ChemSpider Journal. The idea driving the journal is the belief that more “informal” publication platforms, the kinds favored by Open Notebook Science, can co-exist with more “traditional” publication platforms. The ChemSpider Journal is a cross between a pre-print server, PLoS One and a full on peer-reviewed publication. The journal will be open access.
So here are my questions. What kind of authoring tools will be used? What kind of entity extraction/recognition engines will be available? Will this sit on the Semantic Web (RDFa support would be great)? Will OTMI be supported? Time will tell. From what I know of Antony, I suspect things will turn out well.
The Internet Journal of Chemistry was ahead of its time, but too early, and did not make it in the end... let's hope this initiative will work out better...
Web as platform: A chemistry journal on the web
The idea is fascinating and one I have wondered about in the past. If enough publication add semi-structured, or structured, metadata in their content (one reason PDF is not a good mechanism) then you suddenly truly have publications sitting on the programmable web, ready to be mined. My guess is that as time goes on, we will start seeing richer markup on blogs, wikis and general web sites, allowing topic specific search engines and spiders to pull in information. Perhaps more importantly, you can combine this with dictionaries and non-scientific sources to present information rich in content. The question I have is how noisy will this get? I suppose it depends on our filters and ranking algorithms, which will be tasked with building in relevance into results.
Getting back to the ChemSpider Journal. The idea driving the journal is the belief that more “informal” publication platforms, the kinds favored by Open Notebook Science, can co-exist with more “traditional” publication platforms. The ChemSpider Journal is a cross between a pre-print server, PLoS One and a full on peer-reviewed publication. The journal will be open access.
So here are my questions. What kind of authoring tools will be used? What kind of entity extraction/recognition engines will be available? Will this sit on the Semantic Web (RDFa support would be great)? Will OTMI be supported? Time will tell. From what I know of Antony, I suspect things will turn out well.
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