A lot has been said about the scientific publication process, and how the publishers add value. I have commented before on the joys of being asked to pay extra page charges for colour pixels (n.d.a) which as a naive scientist (n.d.b) I would think costs the same as black and white ones. I am not always convinced of the value that is bought but even I am occasionally surprised by how paleolithic the industry can be. An example is a new article on Clojure for concurrency.

I have been working on a Clojure library for developing OWL ontologies (n.d.a) There have been two significant advances with this library recently. First, I have changed its name from clojure-owl to tawny-owl. I was never really happy with the original name; I think it is bad practice to name something after the language it uses (even partly, as the many jlibraries attest), and there was several other libraries around for manipulating OWL in clojure, albeit in different ways. “Tawny” is simple and straight-forward and memorable, I think. At the same time, I moved to Github because I can now just updated readme.md, rather than having to update a separate website.

I have been developing a library written in Clojure, that I can use for building OWL ontologies programmatically (n.d.a) The basic idea behind this library is to give me something that looks like Manchester syntax (n.d.b/) but which is none the less fully programmatic; it can be extended arbitrarily, both for general use and for one-off, single ontology specific custom code.

I have previously described the difficulty that we have had publishing in semantic web conferences (n.d.a) the two main conferences (ESWC and ISWC) both publish with Springer-Verlag, and so provide no open access option.

I was recently described by Duncan Hull as waging a one man war for metadata on the web. There is a degree of truth in this, of course. Since Lindsay Marshall (n.d.a/) and myself started work on Greycite (n.d.b) (Lindsay writes it, then I break it, roles both of us are happy with), there is a degree of truth in this. I have found myself continually amazed by which websites do or do not carry metadata. Often there is none whatsoever, and sometimes it’s just wrong.