Abstract |
In the last years, many approaches and systems have been presented for
what has been called semantic publishing. Closer inspection, however,
reveals that these approaches are mostly not about publishing semantic
representations, as the name seems to suggest. Rather, most approaches
take the processes and outcomes of the current narrative-based
publishing system for granted and only work with the already published
papers. This includes semantic annotations, semantic interlinking,
semantic integration, and semantic discovery, but with the semantics
coming into play only after the publication of the original article.
While these are interesting approaches, they fall short of providing a
vision to transcend the current publishing paradigm. We argue for taking
the term semantic publishing seriously and work towards a vision of
genuine semantic publishing, where computational tools and algorithms
can help us with dealing with the wealth of human knowledge by letting
researchers capture their research results with formal semantics from
the start. We argue that genuine semantic publications should come with
formal semantics as an integral and primary component at the time of
publication, that these representations should be complete in essence,
in the sense that they cover the main results, that they should be
authentic in the sense that they originate from the authors, and that
they should be fine-grained and light-weight for optimized re-usability
and minimized publication overhead. |