On 3/22/11 4:28 PM, Chitu Okoli wrote:

Reid wrote:

There also appear to be various options for Semantic MediaWiki hosting:

Wikia, Referata, etc. It would be nice to not have to deal with the

sysadmin aspects of the project.

I agree that going with a reliable host would be the way to go. I think

that for the nature of our project, choosing a paid Referata plan would

probably be better than going for Wikia. I for one could probably easily

find grant funding to keep it going.

Sure. If nothing else I'd be happy to chip in personally. I could also 
ask around for funding here at IBM, but I'm quite pessimistic on that.

Paid plans run from $240 to $960/year, and we could certainly get 
started for free (http://www.referata.com/wiki/Referata:Features).

I'm not ready to write off AcaWiki, but I have a number of significant 
concerns. Some of these I've mentioned before. I'd really like someone 
from that project to comment on these.

* Is the project dead? The mailing list is pretty much empty and the 
amount of real editing activity in the past 30 days is pretty low.

* It appears that the project self-hosts - this means that the project 
has to do its own sysadmin work,

which appears to have been a problem 
(e.g., the domain expired earlier this month and no one noticed until 
the site went down!).

* Is the target audience correct? I think we want to specifically target 
our annotated bibliography to researchers, but AcaWiki appears to be 
targeting laypeople as well as researchers (and IMO it would be very 
tricky to do both well).

* I don't think the focus on "summaries" is right. I think we need a 
structured infobox plus semi-structured text (e.g. sections for 
contributions, evidence, weaknesses, questions).

* It doesn't look like a MediaWiki. Since the MW software is so 
dominant, that means pretty much everyone who knows about editing wikis 
knows how to use MW - and not looking like MW means there's no immediate 
"aha! I can edit this". There's a lot of value in familiarity.

I will post an invitation on the AcaWiki mailing to come here and 
participate.

One final note on bibliographic software: many of these claim to do

automatic import of a reference simply by pointing the software at the

publisher's web page for the references. But I have never seen this work

correctly; always, the imported data needs significant cleanup, enough

that personally I'd rather type it in manually anyway. For example,

titles of ACM papers aren't even correctly cased on the official ACM

pages (e.g.,http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753615)!

My only experience with "scraping" pages is with Zotero, and it does it

beautifully. I assume (but don't know) that the current generation of

other bibliography software would also do a good job. Anyway, Zotero has

a huge support community, and scrapers for major sources (including

Google Scholar for articles and Amazon for books) are kept very well up

to date for the most part.

Perhaps I'm just unlucky, then - I've only ever tried it on ACM papers 
(which it failed to do well, so I stopped).

Bi-directional synchronization is hard to get right, particularly when

the two sides have different data models. I think we are much

better off declaring one or the other to be the master and the rest

should remain read-only (i.e. export rather than synchronization).

I like this idea; with SMW as the primary, editable source, a read-only

Zotero library imported from the SMW would work well. The problem,

though, is that duplicate detection would need to prevent imports from

adding existing articles. A complete overwrite would not work, since

this would break article IDs for word processor integration. Zotero has

been slow on implementing duplicate detection, but they finally have a

very impressive solution in alpha

(http://www.zotero.org/blog/new-release-multilingual-zotero-with-duplicates-detection/).

I don't know anything about how article IDs works in Zotero, but how to 
build a unique ID for each is an interesting, subtle, and important 
problem. Others have suggested using opaque IDs such as DOI. I think 
this is a mistake, because it means that they are utterly meaningless to 
people when creating citations. For example, consider the following two 
citations that I might put in my LaTeX code.

\cite{10.1145/1753326.1753615}
\cite{Panciera2010Lurking}

The first means nothing to me, but the second is a useful reminder as to 
the paper I'm citing. That's what CiteULike does, and it's built from 
first author, year, first meaningful word of title. In the tiny 
percentage of cases where this is not unique, a disambiguation digit 
could be added.

I don't know how citation works in Word et al., but I would hope you're 
not stuck with opaque numeric IDs and/or that Zotero doesn't force you 
to use integers or something like that.

Reid

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