Short description:
Force11 (the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship) is a virtual community working to transform scholarly communications toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Currently, we have 315 active members.
A longer description from the “about” page:
Research and scholarship lead to the generation of new knowledge. The dissemination of this knowledge has a fundamental impact on the ways in which society develops and progresses; and at the same time, it feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship. Here, as in so many other areas of human activity, the Internet is changing the way things work: it opens up opportunities for new processes that can accelerate the growth of knowledge, including the creation of new means of communicating that knowledge among researchers and within the wider community. Two decades of emergent and increasingly pervasive information technology have demonstrated the potential for far more effective scholarly communication. However, the use of this technology remains limited; research processes and the dissemination of research results have yet to fully assimilate the capabilities of the Web and other digital media. Producers and consumers remain wedded to formats developed in the era of print publication, and the reward systems for researchers remain tied to those delivery mechanisms.
Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology. Force11 has grown from a small group of like-minded individuals into an open movement with clearly identified stakeholders associated with emerging technologies, policies, funding mechanisms and business models. While not disputing the expressive power of the written word to communicate complex ideas, our foundational assumption is that scholarly communication by means of semantically enhanced media-rich digital publishing is likely to have a greater impact than communication in traditional print media or electronic facsimiles of printed works. However, to date, online versions of ‘scholarly outputs’ have tended to replicate print forms, rather than exploit the additional functionalities afforded by the digital terrain. We believe that digital publishing of enhanced papers will enable more effective scholarly communication, which will also broaden to include, for example, the publication of software tools, and research communication by means of social media channels. We see Force11 as a starting point for a community that we hope will grow and be augmented by individual and collective efforts by the participants and others. We invite you to join and contribute to this enterprise.
Force11 grew out of the FORC Workshop held in Dagstuhl, Germany in August 2011.
FORCE11 is a movement of people interested in furthering the goals stated in the FORCE11 manifesto. An important part of our work is information gathering and dissemination. We invite anyone with relevant information to provide us links which we may include on our websites. We ask anyone with similar and/or related efforts to include links to FORCE11. We are a neutral information market, and do not endorse or seek to block any relevant work.
The Tools and Resources page is particularly interesting.
Current divisions are:
- Alternative metrics
- Author Identification
- Annotation
- Authoring tools
- Citation analysis
- Computational Linguistics/Text Mining Efforts
- Data citation
- Ereaders
- Hypothesis/claim-based representation of the rhetorical structure of a scientific paper
- Mapping initiatives between ontologies
- Metadata standards and ontologies
- Modular formats for science publishing
- Open Citations
- Peer Review: New Models
- Provenance
- Publications and reports relevant to scholarly digital publication and data
- Semantic publishing initiatives and other enriched forms of publication
- Structured Digital Abstracts – modeling science (especially biology) as triples
- Structured experimental methods and workflows
- Text Extraction
Topic maps fit into communication agendas quite easily.
The first step in communication is capturing something to say.
The second step in communication is expressing what has been captured so it can be understood by others (or yourself next week).
Topic maps do both quite nicely.
I first saw this in a tweet by Anita de Waard.