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Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting knowledge in academic research

Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, USA and Liam Magee, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Australia

A good book for its wealth of sometimes profound insights into the evolution of scholarship and scientific communication from a relatively static print culture into what's already emerged as a protean electronic culture.
College and Research Libraries

 - provides an introduction to the ‘semantic web’ and semantic publishing for readers outside the field of computer science
 - discusses the relevance of the ‘semantic web’ and semantic publishing more broadly, and its application to academic research
 - examines the changing ecologies of knowledge production
 - adds a social-scientific and philosophical perspective to questions of ontology and knowledge representation, central to computerised information recording
 - suggests a practical, next-generation approach to knowledge representation and academic publishing

This book addresses the question of how knowledge is currently documented, and may soon be documented in the context of what it calls ‘semantic publishing’. This takes two forms: a more narrowly and technically defined ‘semantic web’; as well as a broader notion of semantic publishing. This book examines the ways in which knowledge is represented in journal articles and books. By contrast, it goes on to explore the potential impacts of semantic publishing on academic research and authorship. It sets this in the context of changing knowledge ecologies: the way research is done; the way knowledge is represented and; the modes of knowledge access used by researchers, students and the general public.

Readership: Researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of library science, research methods and computer science.

£70.00 / US$120.00 / €85.00

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About the authors

Dr. Bill Cope is a Research Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois and Director of Common Ground Publishing, a company which develops internet publishing software and is located in the Research Park at the University of Illinois. His most recent books are edited collections, The Future of the Book in the Digital Age, Chandos, Oxford, 2006, and The Future of the Academic Journal, Chandos, Oxford, 2009.

Dr. Mary Kalantzis is Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and, with Bill Cope, co-author of The Powers of Literacy, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993; Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, Routledge, 2000; New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008; and Ubiquitous Learning, University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Dr. Liam Magee is a research project leader at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, working on the theory and practice of the semantic web.

Titles which may also be of interest:
Indexing
Ontologies, Taxonomies and Thesauri in Systems Science and Systematics
Finding the Concept, Not Just the Word
Digital Information Contexts

Contents

Changing knowledge systems in the era of the social web
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
 - From print to digital text
 - Distributed knowledge systems: the changing role of the university
 - About this book
 - References

Frameworks for knowledge representation
Liam Magee
 - Putting things in order
 - Introducing the semantic web
 - Towards a framing of semantics
 - References

The meaning of meaning: alternative disciplinary perspectives
Liam Magee
 - Linguistic semantics
 - Cognitive semantics
 - Social semantics
 - Computational semantics
 - References

What does the digital do to knowledge making?
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
 - The work of knowledge representation in the age of its digital reproducibility
 - The old and the new in the representation of meaning in the era of its digital reproduction
 - Conclusions
 - References

Books and journal articles: the textual practices of academic knowledge
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
 - The role of knowledge representation in knowledge design
 - The scholarly monograph
 - The academic journal
 - Future knowledge systems
 - Conclusions
 - References

Textual representations and knowledge support-systems in research intensive networks
Richard Vines, William P. Hall and Gavan McCarthy
 - Introduction
 - Towards an ontology of knowledge
 - The theory of hierarchically complex systems
 - Research knowledge and the dynamics of hierarchically complex systems
 - Implications for managing research enterprises in a knowledge society
 - Conclusions
 - Acknowledgements
 - Appendix: a preliminary ontology for research knowledge support
 - References

An historical introduction to formal knowledge systems
Liam Magee
 - Pre-modernity: logical lineages
 - Early modernity: the mechanisation of thought
 - Crises in modernity: the order of logic and the chaos of history
 - References

Contemporary dilemmas: tables versus webs
Liam Magee
 - Ordering the world by relations
 - Early threads of the semantic web
 - Shifting trends or status quo?
 - Systems of knowledge: modern and postmodern
 - Knowledge systems in social context
 - References

Upper-level ontologies
Liam Magee
 - A survey of upper-level ontologies
 - A dialogical account of ontology engineering
 - Conclusions: assessing commensurability
 - Appendix: upper-level ontologies—supplementary data
 - References

Describing knowledge domains: a case study of biological ontologies
Liam Magee
 - Biological ontologies
 - Biological cultures, ontological cultures
 - Ontological objects
 - Towards compromise: ontologies in practice
 - References

On commensurability
Liam Magee
 - A world of ‘material intangibles’: social structures conceptual schemes and cultural perspectives
 - De-structuring critiques: struggling with systems, structures and schemes
 - Interlude: constructions of science
 - Elastic structures: linking the linguistic, the cognitive and the social
 - Towards a framework…
 - References

A framework for commensurability
Liam Magee
 - What to measure—describing ‘ontological cultures’
 - Presenting a framework for commensurability
 - Applying the framework
 - References

Creating an interlanguage of the social web
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
 - The discursive practice of markup
 - Structural markup
 - Metamarkup: developing markup frameworks
 - Developing an interlanguage mechanism
 - Schema alignment for semantic publishing: the example of Common Ground Markup Language
 - What tagging schemas do
 - Interlanguage
 - References

Interoperability and the exchange of humanly usable digital content
Richard Vines and Joseph Firestone
 - Introduction
 - The transformation of digital content
 - The XML-based interlanguage approach: two examples
 - The ontology-based interlanguage approach: OntoMerge
 - Evaluating approaches to interoperability
 - Addressing the translation problem: emergent possibilities
 - Conclusions
 - Acknowledgements
 - References

Framing a new agenda for semantic publishing
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
 - The academic language game
 - Disciplinarity, or the reason why strategically unnatural language is sometimes powerfully perceptive
 - Towards a new agenda for semantic publishing
 - References