Specifications

We’re working on technical specifications that enrich our abilities to share knowledge, opinion, and personal experience in our collective quest for greater light and understanding. Achieving our mission calls for collaborating on these open technical standards.

Come join us! We need you.

Machine Vocabularies

Specifications built using open machine vocabularies bring rich possibilities in our ability to communicate knowledge and understanding. These vocabularies are designed for web applications and open research systems and platforms. We use and refine them in the software we are creating. We hope they will prove useful to others as well.

Knowledge Design

A term coined by Jeffrey Schnapp, knowledge design is the future of scholarship, where the process is the product.

Research Cases
Research Cases are a way to partition research conceptually into cases, each case organized around a question (or some other sort of cognitive discordance). They are designed for iterative, real-time research publication, and encourage open collaboration and discourse throughout the research process.
Research Cases

Dynamic Machine Interfaces

We see the future of the Web made of clients that are more intelligent than the servers with which they interact. We need ways for these intelligent clients to uniformly interact, and we call these ways dynamic machine interfaces, to differentiate them from traditional application programming interfaces. DMIs use ontologies that are designed to function in the REST architectural style for machine interfaces and interactions.

If you want to catch the vision of some of the possibilities, check out the thesis Serendipitous Web Applications through Semantic Hypermedia by Ruben Verborgh.

Hydra
Hydra Community Group

Consensus Documents

Documents on which we’re collaborating with other people and groups, and through which we’re trying to reach some sort of consensus.

Scholarly Commons

The Scholarly Commons is not a website, nor a platform or organization, but the convergence around a set of principles, standards, and best practices that govern how research artifacts (narrative, code, data, workflows, etc.) should be handled for maximum human and machine-based access. The Scholarly Commons is not an incremental improvement of the current system of scholarship and science, but a ground-up redesign of the entire system, from every perspective.

Principles of the Scholarly Commons
A set of principles that express the substance of the Scholarly Commons, created by the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group.

Some of our thoughts on the Scholarly Commons

Putting the Pieces Together: Technology
What needs to be enabled by technology to allow for scholarly commoning.