Drafting Legislation Using XML at the U.S. House of Representatives
At this point, the House has been using the XML authoring environment for House-only resolutions since January 2001 and began drafting bills in XML in September 2002. The House plans to draft over 95% of introduced bills in XML by January 2003.
Check out xml.house.gov to see what the U.S. legislature has been up to with XML. If you are in DC, there is a presentation next week about their efforts as well.
Below is a link and abstract for an article in First Monday that explores the potential paths for scholarly publishing vis-a-vis the Web and copyright.
Coming from the publishing side, it is hard to imagine not extracting subscription income for access to archives of journal content. However, I can definitely see the value of free access for both the authors and the overall research community. When you throw in tenure calculations it becomes a very complex situation.
Whatever your point of view, the article is definitely worth a read if you are involved in academic publishing.
Copyright Contradictions in Scholarly Publishing
This paper examines contradictions in how copyright works with the publishing of scholarly journals. These contradictions have to do with the protection of the authors’ interest and have become apparent with the rise of open access publishing as an alternative to the traditional commercial model of selling journal subscriptions. Authors may well be better served, as may the public which supports research, by open access journals because of its wider readership and early indications of greater scholarly impact. This paper reviews the specifics of publishers’ contracts with editors and authors, as well as the larger spirit of copyright law in seeking to help scholars to better understand the consequences the choices they make between commercial and open access publishing models for the future of academic knowledge.
Rick Klau has written up a K-Log Pilot Recap.
Bottom line: we learned a lot about how we want to share information internally. Noone in the company had a bad experience with their weblog. Some gravitated to it, while others found themselves more as a “consumer” of information rather than a “producer”. This experience provoked a number of excellent conversations about what kind of information would be valuable inside the company. Sales people started thinking about what they did that might be useful for product management; development started thinking about what marketing was working on that might make them more effective.
Thanks for writing up your experience!
Found via pixelcharmer: Important Works for Web Navigation. Nice collection of references.
I suspect that both individual users and corporations value control over their checkbooks — and ownership of their software — quite a bit and the subscription model will have to be built around substantial incremental value in new software, new access to additional function and support, or other customer seductions to get this idea off the ground.
A new blog that tracks the experience of Adam Gaffin as he implements a CMS. (found via Column Two).
From :Column Two: Death of keywords:
To me, this really highlights the challenges (futility?) of the so-called “semantic web”, where everything describes itself, cross-linking happens automatically and accurately, and search engines only return useful results…
If we can’t get even simple keywords tags to work in practice, what hope is there for RDF, and the rest?
My own opinion is that any acitivity or tool that requires consistent, similar, behaviors across the entire Web (such as accurate keywording of web pages) will not happen.
However, that doesn’t mean the keyword metatag is dead. It can still be an effective tool for a collection of content whose authors/owners are willing to invest time and effort into for accurate searching and indexing. The Web might evolve into small, organized, clusters of content that create semantic islands in a chaotic sea.
From a post on the IA-CMS list: Thesaurus::RDF — The RDF Thesaurus descriptor standard for the Zthes thesaurus format.
This article by Claire Hudson in FirstMonday proposes 7 different categories of functions performed by hyperlinks within web sites:
Further definitions of each category are provided in the article. This view of links could be useful when trying to troubleshoot why certain links are not followed by users. Perhaps you intend it as a mode-changing link but your users tend to identify it as authorizing (and thus ignore it :).
Here is an interesting quote from that same article that applies to the weblogging world:
In other words, no hypertext – whether static or dynamic, explicit or implicit, and strongly or weakly authored – can be divorced from the subjectivity of human choice.
…
Hypertexts, then, are a social/cultural phenomenon, based on the ideologies of the particular communities – for example, a corporation, government department, non-profit organization – from which they emerge. These ideologies work to create, enhance, and restrict users’ access to information.
This furthers the theme that collections of links in a weblog, even without explicit editorial comments, do convey the editorial opinions of the weblog author.
Seb’s Open Research has published Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research.
In this document, I analyze an emerging form of knowledge sharing that I call personal knowledge publishing. Personal knowledge publishing has its roots in a practice known as “weblogging” that has been rapidly spreading on the World Wide Web over the last three years. It is a new form of communication that many expect will change the way people work and collaborate, especially in areas where knowledge and innovation play an important role.
I’ve scanned the article and it looks like a very detailed and thoughtful piece on what weblogs are and how they can assist in academic research. I’ll definitely be going back for a more thorough read.
C. David Gammel, CAE 