Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 5, 2010

The Future of the Journal

Filed under: Uncategorized — Patrick Durusau @ 6:21 am

The Future of the Journal is another slide deck by Anita de Waard that reads like a promotional piece for topic maps, sans any mention of topic maps.

While Anita makes a strong case for annotation of data in science publishing, the same is true for government, legal, environmental, business, finance, etc., publications. All publications are as complex as depicted on these slides. It isn’t as obvious in the humanities because that “data” has been locked away so long that we have forgotten it is there.

The more complex the information we record, via “annotations” or some other mechanism, the greater the need for librarians to organize it and help us find it. Self-help in research is like the guy about to do a self-appendectomy with his doctor’s advice over the phone. Doable, maybe, but the results are pretty much what you would expect.

Rather than future of the journal, I would say: Future of Information.

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