| Ashing |
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| Overview |
At its core, Ashing is a programme for online repositories of
(academic) articles. It allows easy upload of articles, search
functions, download, intelligent management of people
(authors), institutions (affiliations), etc.
The longer term experimental goal of Ashing is to develop academic communities around those articles. Each community has a webpage showing the new articles relevant to its members, a blog, etc. Possible experiments include:
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| The Code |
Ashing is free software (sometimes called "open source"). This means
that anyone can download it and change it,
experiment with it, improve it. In fact, you are highly encouraged to
do so. If you do change it, the license requires that you contribute
your improvement back to the community.
Ashing is written by Michal Starke in Smalltalk, with the brilliant web framework in Seaside. (One consequence of this is that the code runs on any machine you can think of: Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux, BeOS, Acorn/RiscOS, etc. and hence anybody can easily play with it). Anyone is welcome to join and help developing it.
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| Status |
Qua article repository, Ashing is now stable and reliable. It contains
the basic features one would expect from an article repository. It is
safe to upload your papers and use it as a place to get new articles.
The next steps are: (i) make it easy to aggregate articles from
other archives, (ii) make its data available in standard OAI format.
Qua community experiment, Ashing is at the "useful prototype" stage. There is already the concept of communities, a basic blogging system, and a hit-parade of most downloaded articles has been recently added. The experiment can however only grow when the first Ashing repository (lingBuzz) starts getting more traffic and users. The next experimental steps: add a hit-parade of recent downloads, relativise the hit-parade to each community (only one global hitparade is currently available), experiment with automatic reference extraction from the papers in the archive.
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| The Name |
Ashing is named in hommage to Angelo Shingre, who stood up for his ideals despite the
risks.
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| Goals, History |
The most basic motivation for ashing was the surprising and
frustrating lack of a decent article repository in generative syntax
together with the lack of a flexible repository software to allow
experimentation of the kind described above. Two other motivations
were the increasing frustration of many researchers with the
publishing industry, and a desire to experiment with some
internet-based community building.
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