you
Okay, the Agora project builds on a number of existing projects that have been going for a number of years now
Some of the I'm not naming any names in the course of this presentation
I think but you will almost certainly recognize some of the projects the idea is to explore
Some of the more innovative ways around that we've all heard talked about at conferences like this
Built around the ideas of open access built around the ideas of linked data
But actually putting them to the test with a specific subject domain namely philosophy
About which I also know nothing I hasten to add
The project has a series of experiments and the website where you can get some
Reasonably authoritative information is at that address you see on the screen. So who are the partners at the moment?
The partners do change
Somewhat drastically from time to time. It's currently being coordinated by the
Lecico into a let the wall a or opio a story of that lead
in Rome the
Which is a long standard actually historically speaking. That's a
Lab that has been going for many many years since the early days of digital humanities in Europe. It's very well-established
institutions similarly eat em nia's tiki de texti manage Lee model in Paris
the Wittgenstein archives at the University of Bergen who I'm sure many of you know the
Ontos is a small publisher a commercial publisher of philosophical works based in Frankfurt the University of Copenhagen is the most recent
Institution to join the project and most of the heavy lifting in the project is being done by a software house that some of you
May know called net seven based in Pisa. It has substantial funding from the EU for the next few years. So that's good
It has five main areas that are being experimented and the one obviously that I'm most closely involved with is
The use of tei as a vehicle for publishing of modern journals
But it also has work going on and experiments have been defined for semantic
Contextual linking for the use of linked open data in particular as a way of exploiting scholarly linking for the open access
the implications of open access both from the point of view of an author in terms of the peer review process and
From the point of view of a publisher when we talk about the business models that are appropriate
I don't know how many of you saw the news from England today about
The debate in the Houses of Parliament on this everything. Okay
Anyway, so the tei
The initial phase of the project which was completed about six months ago
saw the definition of a single tei based interchange format that could be appropriate for both existing and
previously published
Scientific journal articles a number of projects that have been looking at this
And we thought it would be quite nice to look at them to compare them to see the way in which different
publishing
bodies I
Used the word because we're not just talking about traditional publishing houses
We're talking about learned societies individual groups and so on have chosen to
Adapt the tei to the problem of producing high-quality printed output. I
Did some work?
Looking at all of their different
customizations of the tei
Formal or informal and develop some style sheets that enabled us to combine these defining a new odd a very sort of basic
subset of all of the features
Which was adequate to produce something that looks fairly reasonable on screen and also on print
I should emphasize this is not a high quality
Exercise at all. It was just to produce something that people would look at and say yeah
That's more or less what I wanted it to look like
We've also done some experiments on what is called. I believe round tripping. So
It's a sad fact that a lot of people out in the world do not know how to write
Except by using Microsoft Word and much as one might like to change that situation
That's the way the world is and it's important that they write not that they write with a particular toolkit
So we did some work on trying to persuade people to use for example built-in Microsoft Word styles
We created a template that fitted that that was kind of fairly accessible and comprehensible
But which could then be used to automatically convert what had been produced into TIP 5
According to our schema and then go back again in the opposite direction and that's ongoing work
Which seems to be moderately satisfactory. Here's a little schema. I can't give talks these days without little pictures like this
But it's actually quite useful
It shows you the the various modes in which we get into this XML format this Agora XML
You can start from your pre-existing XML
The the Wittgenstein archive of course has a huge amount of material already in their TEI app
XML but other partners notably the CNRS said don't have anything in that format for them
Everything must be done in Word
So for them we've defined a word template that controls their use of word
Which means that we can then have an automatic translation into our target
TEI conformance system the
Metadata side of the project is all being managed using a well-known system called OJS open journal system, which I think is
Not exactly the market leader because it's not really a commercial product
But which is one of the one of the most widely deployed systems for maintaining open archive metadata
So we need to interface with that and we've done some work on doing that and we obviously have the usual
methods for exporting from the Agora XML into readable HTML and LaTeX to produce PDF
Now I've got three more slides if that's okay on on some of the other experiments just trying to put all that work into the context
So there's an experiment on semantic link data
Which is again based on the existing the fact that these people are all working really and have worked together for a long time
So they're kind of basically a kind of a small community of practice
Which have got like most school communities of practice in the academic world
They have they they really constitute a knowledge network of some sort
so the idea is to put this together and formalize it in some way and
Specifically to develop ways of interlinking the source documents, you know
The manuscripts of Nietzsche the the published works of Wittgenstein
And the Schopenhauer and a number of other key
European philosophers putting that together with the second resources the articles discussing them
Reviewing them criticizing them and so on which are also being made available in our open our open access archive
It's not it's not it's not a particularly
innovative idea
But it is quite an unusual practice people always talk about it as being one of the things they would like to do
So we thought we'd actually try and see what the real problems are and there's a domain specific
Set of annotations that need to be supplied which can then be exposed in RDF and thus
constituting a domain specific ontology
All of that when integrated together with open journal system and
The portal that net seven are developing means that there will be a sparkle endpoint
Which enables us to deliver this this RDF?
Version of the metadata to other third-party data consumers
So it's not just within this project but within others outside and hence
The track the transfer or the linkage of data can go in the opposite direction
So that we can enhance the links that we've made between say a citation of a given author
and
Data about that author elsewhere in the link data cloud such as other the providers that you see listed there for example
And that means that we can do better
More intelligent search facilities and we can expand queries so that when somebody says I want Friedrich
Shop and our we know which shop and how they're talking about and we know what we know about shopping how from other sources
I'm not going to give you the the linked data presentation others are much better at that than I am
At the other end of the scale or slightly differently. We have an experiment that is looking at the nut the nut the nitty-gritty
If you like the the social reality of the academic world, which is all about publishing
publish or perish the Americans say it used to say at least and
The process of peer review and publishing is kind of central to the whole academic enterprise
Although there is a lot of talk at the moment about changing it
so we have a formal procedure an experiment set up in which we will
Experiment with new ways of doing well not particularly new will look at the process of reviewing papers
Which is being handled by our colleagues in Rome
And the fourth one is the opposite side of things looking at it from the commercial publishers point of view
They will be making available material that is formally speaking closed to the project
On the understanding that then they will be able to look at the different distribution method
Mechanisms and business models that are appropriate when you combine closed data with open metadata
And that's that's going to be an interesting set of results. I think
All of this is going to be evaluated in a formal way using something called value sensitive design anybody know what that is
I don't
Sorry, anyway people who do evaluation
Know what it is. So we said, okay, we'll do that
I think it's particularly used when people work out whether trying to assess where the software is good for you in some sense
So the idea is to apply this set of techniques to software development
Originally conceived of software development to publishing in the open access context
current status
Well, we had a midterm review
Which is the moment when the EU funders look at what you've done and say but it says here and they didn't
So that was good. We have got a good result. They were very happy with the work the progress made on the project
Several parts in particular the the main part that I'm responsible for is now in place and in production
We have a large number of articles already assembled in the in the system the workflow through the rest of the project
That's going to feed into the different experiments has been agreed
partners are setting the experiments in motion there is an experimental version of the linked open data access portal is now available and
There is a lot more software to be developed
So as with all good presentations, I conclude by saying there will be more next year. Thank you for your attention