When I was an undergrad first learning about Semantic Web, this idea was so obvious it was frustrating that it didn't already exist. It would make current citation seem primitive. Different fields would perhaps follow different citation ontologies, analogous to citation/bibliography formats today.
Imagine what it would do to literature review to draw from a 'tree of knowledge' of all the supporting texts of a work, or to see all the work that claims to derive particular meaning from some seminal work.
>Most academics can't even be bothered to write alt-text for their images, so any extra labour is likely to be resisted.
This is probably true, and it will ultimately mean authors sacrificing their agency over the semantic understanding of their writing; allowing e.g. Google Scholar to decide the meaning of their works' relationship to the literature.
Citations take a lot of time already as it is. Any extra metadata would take a ton of time and for what? Just so some data nerds that wouldn’t read the paper anyway can play with it?
My undergrad semweb zealot self would say that it would ultimately replace the need for a lot of verbiage that only really does the work that the semantic connection would.
Today, I would say that your writing is getting coded with significant additional meaning, do you want to do it or do you want someones AI to do it after you publish it?
Well in many fields, you will have to write that "unnecessary verbiage" anyway, and with good reason as humans are crap at reading metadata or switching between text and another document such as a citation tree.
I definitely do not want to do it, and no matter what someones AI or algorithm will anyway analyze my work, not matter what I do.
It's worse. Most academics don't even make their citations links, even though this is probably the most obvious use case ever for links. Instead, we get PDFs that really want to pretend they're paper journals, and citation formats that try to just infodump enough for you to go find the paper yourself.
C'mon... It's not that hard. Link the text to the references section with the full citation, and include a link in the reference to look it up by the arxiv or by doi. If the link doesn't work, the citation should be enough to recover the text, assuming that the civilization hasn't collapsed.
And only having biliography/endnotes is annoying. If I want to check sth, I do not want to scroll all the way to the end first, so footnotes ftw. And for those, having long extra things in them like links is annoying. Though admittedly of course this depends on personal preferences and discipline.
The problem is that there's more than one view on ontology, and the dominant view changes sometimes.
Look at biology, where the knowledge is expected to be based on directly observable, highly repeatable phenomena like animals or plants. The tree of life that orders the species, families, etc up to the realms at root is constantly reviewed and reordered close to leaves, and had seen a few changes close to the root.
Ontology, being a lot less strict than disciplines studying more direct observation, would have much trouble producing a universally agreed-upon tree of notions, and a lot of energy would be spent around contested branches.
I suppose the only possible outcome is an ontological forest, or shrubs, like what we have now, which is only locally helpful.
> Imagine what it would do to literature review to draw from a 'tree of knowledge' of all the supporting texts of a work, or to see all the work that claims to derive particular meaning from some seminal work.
You can visualize all of these things using Scholia https://scholia.toolforge.org . Built on free and open citation data, no need for Google Scholar or anything proprietary.
Imagine what it would do to literature review to draw from a 'tree of knowledge' of all the supporting texts of a work, or to see all the work that claims to derive particular meaning from some seminal work.
>Most academics can't even be bothered to write alt-text for their images, so any extra labour is likely to be resisted.
This is probably true, and it will ultimately mean authors sacrificing their agency over the semantic understanding of their writing; allowing e.g. Google Scholar to decide the meaning of their works' relationship to the literature.