A bit of background about openacademia.org:

It started with us getting tired of having to put together a joint publication list for our group at the VU. Before openacademia, this typically went by all of us mailing his/her BibTex to our secretary, who than did the merging with varying success. openacademia first replaced this process by having two components: one for turning BibTex into RDF [1] and a smusher for merging publication metadata. Then we realized we might as well use this data to also publish the joint list on the group’s website, and once we are at it, why not create an RSS feed as well? openacademia got a third component, with which you can execute a SPARQL query on the store and it outputs an RSS 1.0 feed which contains the metadata and it also preserves the ordering of query results (so that for example you can subscribe to latest publications). This is pretty cool: now you can add this to your favorite feed reader and watch what your immediate colleagues are writing.

And then why not give the same functionality for individual researchers? If you have a BibTex file you can use openacademia to generate HTML from just that single file. Yep, the HTML will contain RDFa. You can also do this dynamically, so that whenever you update your web-accessible BibTex file, your homepage updates as well.

But this is not all… since we had an RDF crawler, we threw that in as well… so all you have to do to make yourself part of the openacademia universe is to add to your FOAF profile. Alternatively, you can also point to the service at [1] and say

<rdfs:seeAlso resource=”http://www.cs.vu.nl/cgi-bin/mcaklein/bib2swrc2.pl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.org%2Fmypubs.bib”

but slightly more techie…

If our crawler finds it, it will be added to the central openacademia repository. Btw, you can also use FOAF’s Group class to define your group, so that others can subscribe to your group (and you can independently change who is in the group and who is not). At the VU we went all the way to generate FOAF group definitions from our LDAP database. Btw, you can also subscribe to the latest publications of all your friends, based on foaf:knows relations in your profile.

And lastly we built the search interface that is openacademia.org… a simple search/browsing/visualization interface for the central repository. There are a few other nice pieces such as the automated tagging of publications using term extraction or the importing of comments from Technorati. This latter one is actually kind of fun, because it gives an easy way to discover what people are blogging about your pubs. Yes, you can subscribe to publications by yourself, recently commented on by others…

Some people asked already if all this is LOD compatible… the answer is that as it is no: the service at [1] generates URIs like

http://www.example.org/mypubs.bib#key

where key is the publication key from the bibtex file. This is problematic because most people host their Bibtex files along with their homepage and they have no access to configuring the apache server of their university, research institute etc. Obviously, JWS could do something like

http://www.elsevier.com/jws/2007/03/01/somepub

However, you have to convince a publisher… conferences might be easier targets.

And now the sad part about openacademia: we have no time any more to work on it. I’m 110% busy (but loving it). Hoping someone will pick it up. It’s open source and nicely modularized, everything is a web service, and we went to some extremes to use standards wherever we could. (The search result display you see on the search interface is generated by XSLT on the RSS feed, on the client side… that’s why you can choose the presentation template, e.g. list view, full view, google view…)

Looking for someone to pick up the ball and start running with it

[1] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mcaklein/bib2rdf/

I would appreciate any comments on what more would the community like to see in the next releases of JeromeDL.

But more broadly, on the dogfood question, I’m still waiting to see when semweb bloggers are doing to exploit the potential of RDFa. Having SPARQL plug-ins for WordPress is one thing, but it doesn’t really go very far for end users. Maybe a JQuery plugin that could layer additional SPARQL-derived information on top of content links? That could also ultimately add a lot of value to scholarly content.

you uninformed fool, this already has been done for ESWC2008 conference and can be accessed here http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/eswc/2008/html

1. The conference location is interlinked with DBpedia and Geonames. See http://beckr.org/marbles?lang=en&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdata.semanticweb.org%2Fconference%2Feswc%2F2008

2. Papers are interlinked with Revyu and the Semantic Web Community Wiki. See for instance
http://beckr.org/marbles?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdata.semanticweb.org%2Fconference%2Feswc%2F2008%2Fpaper%2F356

3. Paper topics are interlinked with DBpedia. See URL above.

4. Authors are interlinked with their FOAF profiles (not all, but a fair amount of them). See
http://beckr.org/marbles?lang=en&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdata.semanticweb.org%2Fperson%2Frichard-cyganiak

The same is currently being done for the WWW2008 conference. The data is not yet available as Linked Data, but there is already a dump at http://data.semanticweb.org/dumps/conferences/www-2008-complete.rdf

There is also a PHP script for converting conference metadata from the EasyChair conference management system to Linked Data which will be published shortly on the Dogfood page, so that other conferences and workshops can do the same if they like.

Cheers

Chris