ADA Semantic Publishing Pipeline

– Rapid publishing software

See GitHub: https://github.com/TIBHannover/ADA 

The software development had two goals. 

  1. Firstly, creating a prototype open-source pipeline for collaborative authoring and single source multi-format publishing. 
  2. Secondly, looking at what W3C standards can be used for the book, in multi-format publishing and how, or if, these can be extended to computational publishing (semantic publishing).

Both of these goals are being researched by prototyping by making experimental publications.

1. Open-source pipeline for collaborative multi-format publishing - beta

Platform: https://write.handbuch.io/ 

Example publication: The Open Science Guide of Guides - https://github.com/TIBHannover/open-science-guide-of-guides 

We have a working publishing pipeline that has two functionalities, firstly ‘fully automating’ multi-format outputs and secondly, enabling collaborative real-time authoring for academic texts with a Word WYSIWYG experience.

Connecting systems

Central to our pipeline are three systems: GitHub, Fidus Writer, and Vivliostyle.

GitHub primarily works for our pipeline by providing a simple but effective way to publish—by using GitHub a repository we can present the different output formats, and allow further collaborative work to tweak the outputs—while we look for ways to add more automation to the workflow.

The ADA Semantic Publishing Pipeline has connected the three systems by adding an exporter to Fidus Writer to output for GitHub; and having changes made to Vivliostyle for CSS Typesetting to work for a book.

  • Fidus Writer – online multi-user real-time collaborative academic work processor and output engine.
  • Vivliostyle – specialist CSS typesetting and heuristic automatic typesetting for browser based book layout and reading.
  • GitHub – infrastructure for file versioning and collaborative working. For ADA it is used as a publishing platform and for collaborative working.

2. W3C standards for the book: Multi-format, and computational

W3C Standards for book publications appear to have stagnated. With a number of ex-W3C Committee members we are examining how these can be revived for the book. 

Multi-format books

For multi-format books an experiment is being carried out combining these two standards:

This is being worked on with the publication ‘Citizen Science for Research Libraries–A Guide’ with the LIBER Citizen Science Working Group – https://github.com/cs4rl/guide 

Additionally Vivliostyle are advocating for full Paged Media CSS standards to be adopted by browsers such as Firefox and Chrome.

Computational books

For computational books the questions about applying W3C standards becomes even more problematic as this is an emergent field.

We are approaching this question by making a publication called ‘X-Sketchbook’ to look at capturing architectural works using computational publishing. See: https://github.com/TIBHannover/xsketch