Found a proposal about semantic structures for scientific writing

I’ve just been reading this proposal paper by Anita de Waard from the University of Utrecht and ATG in Elsevier, entitled “Semantic Structures for Scientific Writing”. It’s over a year old, but gives some interesting ideas on “a new format for the scientific article [...] where a semantic structure is created by the author during writing”. In a way it’s similar to the idea of structured / semantic blogging, just for different content.

If the article was produced within Semantic Web standards, tools will be created that allow for browsing and integration of this content. Subject specific visualizations which are required for an effective sense making environment will also be developed, if the content is available. Hopefully such structured publications can enhance scientific communication as a whole, within and between specific subfields of science. Feeding back the results of the document model to the Semantic Web community, we would like to help the development of authoring and editing tools, e.g. in the ScholOnto and Semantically Interlinked Online Communities projects. We believe the communication between discourse studies and textual analysis on the one hand, and says Semantic Web and artificial intelligence on the other can finally lead to the new way of publishing which Vannevar Bush thought so overdue in 1945.