Reputation survey

The LiquidPub project is conducting a study aimed at comparing the perceived impact of computer science researchers with bibliometric indicators and other metrics of impact. Response will be treated confidentially and results of the survey will NOT be released publicly, not even within the project. The goal of the survey is simply to determine which scientific metrics are more highly correlated with scientists’ opinions. This result will instead be made publicly available.

 

The list of researchers included in the survey is a random sampling of a longer list of researchers with high h-index maintained by Jens Palsberg at UCLA.

 

The survey has been conducted before in other more controlled environments such as BPM and ICWE conferences, and now is becoming public to compare our previous results with those stemming from a much wider audience.

Please, help us by taking the survey at: http://reseval.org/reputationsurvey

 

Workshop: The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on Various Applications

Last week I attended the workshop on The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on Various Applications. It was organized by Mark Baker from Research3.org. It was an extremely interesting and productive workshop, below I will try to summarize some parallels between presentations and LiquidPub.

Duncan Hull presented Bibliography 2.0 – experience of Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in using CiteULike. The scenario was similar to the selection phase in Liquid Journals – people tag articles they somehow found on the Internet and then most tagged articles are sent out in a weekly digest. There was a set of tags people agreed on beforehand (which seem to correspond to several Liquid Journals or issues in our scenario). The results provided me with some insights on what we can see from selection behavior – typical long tail distribution.  Also, it was not clear how to evaluate quality of selection (e.g. whether people appreciate more papers from the guy who bookmarked 500 papers or from the guy who bookmarked “only” 150, but more interesting ones?). It might be possible to add hash in links so that we can see which links were actually followed by the users (RIN does something similar in their newsletters).

What Liquid Journals could add in Bibliography 2.0 scenario? Automatic gathering of content from Internet sources (publishers’ websites, Google scholar, etc.), privacy settings (share only with me, my friends, friends of friends, whole network), getting not only papers (but also blogs, datasets, scientific workflows). Also, from the scenario we can defines some “desirable” features for LJ – tell whenever [the right] Mark Baker published a paper, new paper matches your keyword alert (those two, apart from “the right” part, are already implemented by Scholar), and, going further, may be about new papers appearing in a certain community.

Roy Williams presented application of Web 2.0 for providing streams of news about astronomical events (appeareances of super nova, asteroids coming too close to the Earth, etc.). Even though the domain is completely different, their workflow of identifying “interesting” events looks extremely similar to the workflow of identifying “interesting” scientific contributions.

David de Roure presented MyExperiment, a virtual research environment for sharing scientific workflows (description of how you conduct an experiment). The presentation confirmed what I knew before the workshop – a scientific workflow could be one of contributions in LiquidJournals. MyExperiment lists more than 1000 workflows and also has a programmatic access via REST API, so they should be easy to crawl. Also, the notion of Research Object is extremely similar to the concept of SKO in LiquidPub. Possible future uses of such concept that were mentioned:
– can I have a copy of your research object?
– what can I do with your research object?
are similar to the questions we have when talking about licensing and copyright, in particular in Liquid Books.

If you want to know more about the workshop, presentations and videos will be available at the workshop website. You can also see the tweets of participants or Andy Turner’s blog, nicely summarizing all discussions.

P.S. And my presentation on Liquid Journals is available here.

Brainshop on Web and Collaborative Technologies for Higher Education (ICE2010)

Brainshop on Web and Collaborative Technologies for Higher Education (ICE2010)

Vienna, July 5th, 2010
In Conjunction with ICWE 2010

The goal of this brainshop is to create a community of people interested in harnessing the power of the web, to be able to provide collaborative technologies that foster new ways of Learning and Teaching. Our motivation is to improve education in a sustainable manner, both in technologically advanced countries as well as in developing countries. Participants interested in contributing to this event should be those that are passionate about providing (or helping to provide) high quality education and that are interested in exploring how web-collaboration technologies can assist in matters such as: preparation of class material and its execution, student collaboration in projects, tools supporting education and the creation and management of educational communities.

We envision this as an opportunity to gather and discuss about stories of success and failure, about ideas and possibilities; to build together a vision and define a plan towards its completion.
More precisely, the desired output of the event is to have:

– A consolidated document that describes what we feel is missing in this space, which are the problems we need to solve and technologies we need to develop in the short and medium term
– A concrete set of steps for how we may address these problems
– A set of consortia for coordinated submissions to european or NSF projects (or from other funding sources)

The event will have no formal proceedings. Results will be collected and published at the icebar web page. Furthermore, a summary of the results and vision will be published in the ICWE workshop proceedings.

ORCID – Open Researcher and Contributor ID

Today I participated in ORCID meeting, where the current progress of the initiative and further steps have been discussed. ORCID represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard. Their mission is to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual’s research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration (from http://orcid.org/aboutus.php).

ORCID seems to be very related to LiquidPub, because they deal with research profiles, i.e. info about name, affiliation, role at primary institution, homepage, publication record, areas of expertise, collaborators, projects, awards, etc. of a researcher. Some features (e.g. selecting publications of a researcher for the individual’s publication record) sounded extremely familiar, since they were also planned in LiquidPub, and in particular, in our collaboration with ICST. Also, the IDs of researchers used for micro-credit attribution (not only for recognizing authorship in a paper, but also for a Wikipedia entry, or for a blogpost) can be a great help for defining novel metrics in ResEval tool, developed by LiquidPub.

A funny thing is that the discussion about board membership (whether it should be individual or institutional) was the longest, while there were almost no comments on technical issues (real work?:)).

The first prototype is going to be ready for this summer, and we might test the public API in LiquidPub.
If you are looking for more info – it is on ORCID private wiki (you should request the membership at http://orcid.org/memberorg-form/index.php). Alternatively, this paper provides a nice high-level overview: Credit where credit is due .

Some thoughts about theoretical (and not only) computer science

In his blog post, Mark C. Wilson very nicely summarizes some concerns about (theoretical, but applied also to general) computer science:

– why people tend to produce too many publications with too few results?

– very weak link between theory and practice

– not much linkage between different areas of CS research

…and so on.

Collaboration between LiquidPub and ICST.org

We are happy to announce the collaboration between the LiquidPub project and The Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST). ICST is a professional society that sponsors research, innovation and technology transfer to harness and maximize the benefits and impact of ICT in all sectors of human society. It actively uses Web 2.0 technologies to improve the way science is conducted, in particular, to promote democracy, transparency and quality in science. We are mainly interacting with the team of CreateNet.

You can read more about collaborations on the following links:

http://icst.org/liquid-publications/ – describes how LiquidBook and LiquidJournal concepts will be used, in particular, you are able to propose a new liquid book series

http://icst.org/reputation-index-ucount/ – describes UCount index, which is a community-defined reputation index that is calculated using the ResEval service of LiquidPub

Gelee: The Prototype of LiquidPub’s Lifecycle Management Tool is available now!

Nearly everything, from real-world objects (a car, a house) to creative work (web pages, documents, scientific papers, code, etc.) goes through a lifecycle from their creation to their end, whatever this end is. Gelee is the LiquidPub’s online platform for modeling, managing en executing these kind of lifecycles, for artifacts of any kind, available in the web.

Lifecycles allow us to model the state of any object, and if we focus on online resources (e.g., a Google Doc) then we can also automate some lifecycle actions. If we apply Gelee to composite artifacts, such as a set of web services, lifecycles provide for the human-driven orchestration of services. Gelee enables universal resource lifecycle management. We use the terms universal and resource as we want the system to manage whatever can be identified by a URI, regardless of its nature, managing application, owner, or location.

Gelee is an open source tool and its development is ongoing. You can test our prototype and find more information at our website. Currently, we are starting to migrate the project to launchpad,  and if you want to collaborate, visit our developers page to learn how. We will be happy to have you on board! Please contact Cristhian Parra (surname at disi dot unitn dot it) if you have any questions.

Examples of Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKO) in the real world: EuroPLoP papers

While preparing EuroPLoP proceedings for submission to DBLP, it occurred to me that EuroPLoP conference follows versioning model followed by the SKO theory. Each year, authors submit papers, which are being improved for three months of shepherding and, sometimes, for two more months left before the conference. Then, versions of the papers being workshopped at the conference appear (and stay forever on the conference page, see, for instance, papers workshopped at EuroPLoP 2003). After the conference, authors have five more months to refine their papers, and post them to the final and official proceedings (e.g., EuroPLoP 2003 proceedings). What is missing now, is an explicit link between the two versions. However, it is easily fixable – author names and, often, titles remain the same. For instance, have a look at the workshopped and final versions of Pippin Barr’s paper on “Interface Ontology: Creating a Physical World for Computer Interfaces”: several figures were added and the paper was shortened, apart from more subtle changes in the content (to discover latter, you should read both papers). Of course, I guess, not all papers make it to the final proceedings, or some are exactly the same as at the time of the conference.

Similar format is adopted by interdisciplines. As far as I know, some conferences or workshops in computer science also have post-proceedings. This indicates that the real world provides a lot of examples for bootstrapping SKOs (in this case, the versioning aspect) and testing this LiquidPub line of research.

A note on the publication culture in computing research

In his article on Revisiting the publication culture in computing research Moshe Vardi, further elaborating on “why conferences in computer science are even more important than journals?” tries to answer the question “Why computer science journals are slow in reviewing” and concludes that it is because CS researchers who run those journals are slow. Why they are slow? Because they do not take editor’s job as seriously as conference chair job. So, taking into account the suggestion from the readers (in order to increase importance of the journals, they must be faster in reviewing), we face a typical chicken-or-egg problem: journals are slow, therefore less important, and they are slow because conferences are more important, which are more important because the journals are slow. Are you following?;)

About LiquidPub Second Snow Workshop

Wybo Wiersma posted his opinion about LiquidPub’s Second Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Creation, Evaluation, and Dissemination