Article Disassembly - New Ways to Handle Information in Publications

Abstract

Articles and books – the basic publication units – could be disassembled to semantic building blocks. For scientific journal articles, such blocks include figures and tables, among others. Providing meta-data for figures and tables, and making them accessible per se, opens up new ways of presenting and using scientific information—like producing an image database on certain subjects, based on figures published in different journals. These meta-data, complete with copyright information, should be supplied by the publishers, who in turn might require authors to provide this information. Some examples are shown from a small astronomy journal, the Information Bulletin on Variable Stars.