The ETAI Bibliographic Resource

Preliminary Description


General and long-term Goals

Scientific publication and communication over the Internet makes it possible to implement a number of new services and facilities which did not have any counterpart in conventional, print-based publication, for example: It is part of the goals of the ETAI to develop these services and facilities, and this is particularly natural since one of the ETAI's basic ideas is to integrate scientific publication and communication. Two technical developments will be necessary for realizing these goals. It is foreseen that these developments will also have spin-off effects that are not intrinsic parts of the goals, but which may anyway be quite useful, for examples tools for the reader of a conventional paper with a conventional reference list, allowing uniform and convenient access to articles which are cited there and which are available on-line.

Current state of development of the bibliographic resource

ETAI's bibliographic resource is presently being developed. We are relying on the LIDOS searchable AI bibliography which has been developed since many years at the DFKI in Saarbrücken, as well as on software and databases which have been inherited from the ECSTER Electronic Colloquium maintained in Linköping. In addition, new software is being developed in order to support the goals described above.

One important basis for the Bibliographic Resource is to have a precise naming scheme for research articles. We propose to use the scheme which is already being used by LIDOS, with minor modifications. Under this proposal, articles may be referenced in two ways: by page number and by author, as in the following example. An article whose first author is G. Dupont and which is published on page 403 ff in the proceedings of the 1993 ECAI Conference can be characterized as c-ecai-93-403 or as c-ecai-93-Dupont. Journal contributions are quoted in a similar fashion but using an initial j for "journal", and with the volume number instead of the year. Conventions for other types of works and for special cases (for example, on volume containing several articles with the same first author) are to be decided.

In the framework provided by this precise naming scheme, the database of the Bibliographic Resource must be capable of mapping article identifiers to any information in or about the article. It must also be able to map between alternative identifiers for the same article, including, of course, other identifier conventions besides the one described here.

The present state of development of this resource can be characterized by the following samples:

Selective conference listings within one ETAI research area

Please click here to see one prototypical example of a specialized, on-line bibliography service for one research area, namely for reasoning about actions and change. It is foreseen that additional services, more or less similar to this one, may be developed for other research areas within ETAI.

Comprehensive conference listings

Please click here to see examples of comprehensive listings of the contents at major A.I. conferences. This type of listings has the character of "spinoff result" from the present effort, as discussed above, but they may also be useful for ETAI area editors and others who wish to develop classified and specialized bibliographies.

Register of A.I. authors

The register of A.I. authors (or click here for version not using frames) will list the following information:

This information will be used in order to equip each mention of a registered author's name, in listings such as those described above, with a hot link to his or her home page. As a secondary effect, the author register should also facilitate obtaining uniformly correct presentation of names, beyond what is practically possible without this database support.


Latest update: 19.5.1997
Maintained by Erik Sandewall, Linköping University, Sweden. E-mail ejs@ida.liu.se.