Carrying on from my earlier report on the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ conference last week, is a brief summary of the session called ‘The Web’s Rich Tapestry’.
I figured this was going to be one of those mind-bending, thought-numbing sessions. The sort of conference paper where genius geeks hold forth on a variety of technical issues, in a mystical language known only to a few. I can’t claim to have emerged totally clear-headed, but only because of the workout my brain received on one of the biggest challenges for research publishers.
In summary: it’s no longer about static pages with references going in and out. Oh no. We are now in the era of the link. Where anyone with intellectual property that the market wants online, needs to consider what kind of links they should make on the Web.
The speakers for the session – Geoff Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, and Leigh Dodds, Platform Programme Manager at Talis – knew their stuff, but managed to convey it in a manner that I could (just) understand. Essentially:
- Academic and specialist societies and publishers need to use digital object identifiers to link across different publisher content
- The importance of Ping or Trackback is huge in terms of efficient logging of links into a source
- We now deal with multiple links online – where the number and type will proliferate (reciprocal, double-headed, you name it)
- You need to think about Wikipedia and other open source resources – what exactly were you citing and is it still the same?
- We’re in an age of automatic links and semantic extraction – searching down to the level of key word – the Semantic Web is the future, now
- How do you authenticate and validate links?
- How can you validate and identify people?
- More links = more traffic = better research tools: this is what the market wants.
So if your head has stopped swimming, consider the skills implications. As an industry, we need the expertise of those who can project manage and outsource to specialist, technical people or who have the technical knowledge themselves. They need to understand how this relates to content, IP and business models. They need to be able to talk the language, but translate for those that don’t.
Some interesting sites where you can explore how this brave new world might work are:
