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Tech Report kmi-97-20 Abstract


Publishing, Interpreting and Negotiating Scholarly Hypertexts: Evolution of an Approach and Toolkit
Techreport ID: kmi-97-20
Date: 1997
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum and Tamara Sumner
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This paper describes the evolution of our approach to scholarly hypertext publishing, which is developing a social model of document usage that places particular emphasis on supporting the interpretation and negotiation of documents. The first part of the paper describes principles derived from hypertext research that underpin a toolkit called D3E which we use to publish an electronic journal. This provides a Web environment that tightly integrates publications with review discussion. In part two, we argue that forming and contesting perspectives are key processes that should be assisted by scholarly hypertexts. In the context of our e-journal, we analyse the representational requirements for hypertext support, and explore the expressive power of a semiformal document encoding scheme that expresses a publication's conceptual relationship to other documents. We conclude by discussing socio-technical issues that this work raises.
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.