W3C HCLS/WG Scientific Discourse/Rhetorically Structured Document

Proposal for a minimal Rhetorically Structured Document

November 10, 2009
Version 0.2
Stephane Corlosquet, Tim Clark, Tudor Groza, Matthias Samwald, Anita de Waard

Prequel:
This task was mandated by the W3C HCLS Working Group at the Conference call on November 6, 2009.  The goal is to create a format for a minimal Rhetorically Structured Semantic Document, which can be used for enabling communications (e.g. Proceedings papers) in which Hypotheses and Evidence are explicitly marked up.

There are a few options to start from:

1. SALT (Semantically Annotated LaTeX):

http://salt.semanticauthoring.org/

 http://www.tudorgroza.org/pub/salt_eswc2007.pdf - this is the original paper (the first one), and since then the model suffered some changes

2. SWAN (Semantic Web Alzheimer's Network):

http://hypothesis.alzforum.org/swan/

3. The abcde concept

3.1 Elements required are:
a.    Annotation: a Simple Dublin Core annotation needs to be added to each document. This can be done using the Dublin Core metadata standard, http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/index.shtml - the minimal set of DC tags that need to be added are creator, date, title  and identifier (for the full set see http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/). Of these, identifier is the most complex one – we can’t let DOIs be created, is there some way to identify each contribution? Let’s discuss!
b.    Background. One or more paragraphs describing the positioning and research question of the issue at hand.
c.    Contribution. One or more paragraphs describing the author’s contribution.
d.    Discussion. One or more paragraphs describing how the contribution compares to other research.
e.    Entities. All references must be given as triples: one elements is a <ref>...</ref>  span of text; the link can be a simply hyperlink, or a link with a URI reference to the SKOS/SIOC/CiTO ontology element; the other element is a DOI or a URL to the document – if it does not have a web-identifier, there needs to be a slot where bibliographic information can be made available. How? Other entities must also be given in an RDF-compatible form.
f.    Core sentences. Within each section, certain sentences or bits of text need to be marked up as core sentences. These are marked up (see 3.1) so they can be easily extracted from the XML. They are externally accessible (so they need a URI: how?)

3.2.    Ways to create document:
3.2.1    In LaTex via the abcde Template.
3.2.2    In Word: a Word Plugin needs to be developed. How? By whom? Help from Microsoft?
3.2.3    Via a Web form. Can we develop a web form that can create this metadata?

3.3.   Ways to represent document:
3.3.1    The annotation, the core sentences, and the basic structure, needs to be available on the web in XML; the metadata needs to be RDF-compatible and accessible to RDF browsers such as sig.ma. How?
3.3.2    A simple html representation must be possible (e.g. via a Stylesheet?)