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Re: Zim and Enhanced Publications, feedback

 

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Niels-Oliver Walkowski <
walkowski@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  Dear Zim Community,
>
> I am writing to you because in the last weeks there was an idea going
> around in my head which I think I just want to drop just to see what
> reactions it raises and what kind of feedback I may get, so it maybe will
> be clearer for me, if this idea makes sense, is reasonable, fits or not.
>
> The background: I am doing my PhD about so called Enhanced Publications,
> digital native publications, mostly on the basis of the OAI-ORE standard
> and Semantic Web related. As these approaches are al very science related
> they don't fit to humanities research and they also have strong epistemic
> commitments which a humanities point of you can not share. In my PhD I
> approach the topic from a analytical and theoretical point of you, but what
> I really would like to do, is to build up - or try to build up - an
> authoring tool which is capable of building such Enhanced Publications
> which reflects my results and humanities research needs (as I understand
> them).
>
> I looked out for existing software which could be interesting in this
> context and which technically was build within my scope. As I personally
> used Zim in the past and Zim is made in Python, it felt a good idea to
> connect it with this idea. At this point compared to my vision three areas
> of further development would have to be done. As Enhanced Publications are
> fundamentally aggregations of resources of any type which build up a
> compound object the integration and metadata description of these objects
> must be possible (it must not be processable), the possibility of semantic
> markup and integration/editing of schemas is essential, the combination of
> several segments (wiki pages) in one view must be possible.
>
> The tasks are somehow substantial which is the reason for me hesitating
> and just asking for feedback. It would interest me if you just see a point
> of connection between what I described and Zim, if there maybe is an
> interest of such a development within the Zim community, what thoughts you
> have reading these lines and also some more precise things, like: Could
> such a development reasonable be done as a plugin or is a branch a better
> solution.  I am still more in a process of playing with thoughts and it
> would help me a lot to hear what you think.
>


I agree with Marco that some real world examples would help tremendously to
understand what it is that you are looking for.


What may or may not be related is the work I'm doing to integrate "cards"
in zim.

Basically this will be a plugin that adds inline objects in zim pages that
contain a couple of fields. These fields can be e.g. properties of an
object being described.

A concrete example would be to use zim as a book catalog. I would want to
define a "book" card that contains fields like "Title", "Author" etc. The
Title would be a text field, the Author could be a linked field referring
to another page with info about the author.

This become semantic in the way that fields can be links that have a type
(e.g. the type "author" in the example above) this forming a triple of the
source page, the target page and the type of relation. Next step of course
is to integrate such objects in the search dialog, link map visualization
etc.

Does this relate to what you are thinking about ?

Regards,

Jaap

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