Discussion of PhilPapers, Misc

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2009-06-18
Projected developments

Here is a summary of some upgrades we are planning for the near future. Please let us know what you think by replying to this message.

Embedding of PhilPapers lists and categories

A system to allow “my works” and other PhilPapers lists (including category listings) to be embedded on third-party pages. The main anticipated use would for individuals to embed “my works” on their personal page or departmental page. This could make it a lot easier for non-tech-savvy people to keep a list of online papers up to date.

Events module

We feel that there is a need for a event announcement service. Conference, talks, calls for papers, etc would be associated with PhilPapers Areas and could be monitored in a variety of way (on the site, via RSS, or by email). Monitoring could be done based on topic and/or geographic area.

Interest groups

Interest groups would be membership-based discussion forums with additional facilities, e.g. sharing of draft papers between members. Reading the posts in and submitting to an interest groups' forums could be limited to members or open to the public, at the choice of the administrator. Membership would by invitation of the group's administrators and/or current members. Groups would also have a shared bibliography.

Improved search facilities

We plan to improve the search facilities in a number of ways. We will index the full text of articles wherever possible. We will also implement a more powerful yet simpler search engine with such features as automated stemming, synonym conflation, and spell-checking. (We plan to use the Sphinx MySQL Engine, for those of you who know about it.)

Annotations

We plan to allow users to attach short texts to PhilPapers entries and provide an interface for searching and organizing these texts and their associated entries. Annotations will be private.

The position review project

This will be a poll of philosophers' positions. See this thread for more information.



2009-06-22
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
All terrific ideas!

Michael Scriven

2009-06-22
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
Hello David:

As for improving the search facilities, you have an interesting opportunity here to implement taxonomies and metadata in such a way to be understandeable by the emerging semantic web technologies.  This would involve using stuff like SKOS, OWL, and RDF. 

You may be aware of this project which is using an OWL ontology to organize SEP.

You may have already thought about all this... just thought I'd throw it out there.

let me know, if you want to discuss more.

Marcus
(the guy who emailed awhile back about helping with DIVRE)

P.S. does philpapers have any interest in building a better SEP? specifically one that used true version control under the covers...which would support things like version history and the ability to cite any article at *any* given time, and have the citation be a reference to a complete internally consistent enyclopedia

P.S.#2  I'm guessing you considered lucene and/or solr.  Just curious why you chose sphinx?


2009-06-24
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
These are excellent ideas. I particularly like the idea of an 'Events module' and the 'Interest groups'.
John Marenbon

2009-07-09
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
All of these sound great.  However, some seem more worth the effort than others. I think the following are most important:  embedding of works, improved search, and personal annotations.  The others sound like they would be difficult to get people to use, especially given that there are other places people do some of those things. I also think the polling idea is a neat one. I've been mulling over this issue myself a bit lately. It would be extremely informative and interesting!

2009-07-24
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
HiYes, all right. all of them were exciting and i thing we need to discuss more than now, so i suggest this one: Interest groups .
I think this can be more useful.
Thanks.
Raha

2009-07-27
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
Yes.... to a conference/events announcement service. A couple of points:
  
  1.   Being able to distinguish between talks/workshops/conferences etc might be a useful feature. Getting departmental talk announcements on general mailing lists (an occasional failing of Philos-L) is annoying and bordering on Spam.
  2. Moreover, it would be great if events etc could work with various digital calenders (eg the ICS format?) so one could subscribe to a calender using microsoft or apple calender, or perhaps a google calender for those who use it? I don't know how doable that would be mind you, but it would be pretty damn cool.
Otherwise... its all looking rather spiffing.














2009-09-16
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
This is all great.
But I hope you can also implement the
Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting.
That would be very important because without it Philpapers.org is not connected to the world of open access. For an overview of open access see HERE. The papers uploaded to Philpapers cannot be found through search engines like OAISTER.org.
Daniel von Wachter


2009-09-17
Projected developments
Hi Daneil, thanks for the suggestion. OAI access is already on its way.

2009-09-17
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
Would any sort of connections/interconnections between philpapers and mendeley be possible? Right now I'm having difficulty with mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/) failing to read JSTOR metadata properly...

2009-09-18
Projected developments
Hi Seamus, in theory Mendeley should be able to import bibtex and RIS metadata exported from PhilPapers. Have you trying the export function with the Endnote format?

Are you saying that this does not work for articles from JSTOR, or only that you are having problems using Mendeley on JSTOR's website?


2009-09-18
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
I had no specific question really, It was just an idle question because I am playing with Mendeley at the moment.

The problem with JSTOR is I have lots of PDFs I've downloaded from JSTOR and mendeley isn't picking up the author/title information properly from the file. But that's not anything to do with philpapers really...

2010-03-06
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
David, can you already say when we will see an OAI interface to philpapers?

2010-03-13
Projected developments
Reply to David Bourget
It would really be great if there were some kind of iphone app for PhilPapers...even better if it would allow editors to troll for papers, etc...