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The ETAI Bibliographic Resource
Preliminary Description
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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:
- On-line bibliographies of research articles on specific
research topics, with rapid update as new articles arrive;
- "Hot" links from such bibliographies to the articles that
are mentioned in them, to the extent that these articles
have been put on-line by their publishers and/or authors;
- Direct links from a public review note or debate
contribution to the articles being discussed there;
- Conversely, links from an on-line article (or from a
bibliographic entry characterizing an article) to the debate
contributions pertaining to it;
- The conventional reference list at the end of a scientific
article may be replaced by "hot" links to the articles being
quoted;
- Inverted reference lists, going from an earlier article to
later ones which have referred to it.
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.
- The creation of a bibliographic resource, a kind of database
system containing information about the accumulated A.I.
research literature;
- The development of authoring software which uses the
bibliographic resource in supporting the development of specialized
bibliographies, research articles, review and debate contributions,
and other additions to the joint literature base.
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:
- Precise name information (spelling, so-called national characters,
various name syntaxes)
- E-mail address
- WWW home page
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.