Academic v3, as I'll be calling this version, or plain old Academic, is a platform for annotating and linking resources. The core idea comes from the basic job of a graduate student: read papers in some topic area, and annotate the paper with a short synopsis so that you don't forget what you read. A really gifted student can just remember authors and papers, and can rattle off the evolution of their field in a non-stop litany of authors, dates, and ideas. The rest of us remember some things, but not everything ("Ah yes, CCR was an important paper that introduced something about something").
While academic papers are still an important area for Academic, the most useful immediate need for Academic is to help link and catalog open data sets. The focus of this application is to collect information about information (so-called metadata) in one place, and to simplify the process of linking data sets by allowing links and relationships to be defined between metadata.
Consider the process of gathering papers on a single topic, say traffic flow theory. A researcher would start by looking for recent papers with "traffic flow" in their titles, and then start reading. Each paper would cover some aspect of traffic flow theory, and each paper would have one or more authors, one or more related topic areas, and many references to older papers. By slowly collecting all of the references papers and reading them, and collecting their references and reading them, a student becomes proficient in a field, learns how the many facets of traffic flow theory relate to each other, and determines where the gaps in the literature are and where he or she can contribute something new.
Now consider the process of collecting public data sets. Each data set exists in isolation, without any obvious links or references to other data sets. And yet, those links do exist. A data set might have a geography related to it, perhaps even explicit geographic fields. It may have monetary information, that in turn relates to other data that also has monetary information. Our work is to gather data sets and everything that is known about them, so that the gaps in the "literature" can be identified and filled in. For example, if one data set uses census tracts, and another links data by roadway name, then to link the two sets one would need to link roadway names to census tracts. If there is no such data set, then it needs to be created. If there is such a linkage already, then it will need to be properly cataloged and temporally tagged to be useful (census tracts and roadways change over time, and are only meaningful for data collected at roughly the same time).
The idea of annotating and linking things on the web is certainly not new. That was the original idea behind the internet, after all, with hyperlinks allowing one to link anything to anything else. However, the internet today is much less an internet of hyperlinks, and more like an internet of polished apps and walled gardens for social interactions. Thus there is still a need for Academic.
Academic is something I started in grad school and that lived on the internet for a while until I noticed somebody poaching all my work. And anyway, it was a mess with a dropdown box or two or three or four from hell.
Copyright 2013 James E. Marca
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