Computational Publishing Pilot Project. Introducing Our Partners and Communities

Our last post on Computational Book Publishing by Simon Bowie kicked off our documentation of this COPIM WP6 Experimental Publishing Pilot Project, which consists of a collaboration between COPIM, the Open Science Lab at the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) Hanover (working with Simon Worthington as the lead on this collaboration) and Open Book Publishers. The aim of this Pilot Project is to create a working prototype or proof of concept for the publication of computational books, based on real (sample) digital objects, and to adapt this to the publishing workflow of Open Book Publishers. The central question this pilot wants to address is how computational books—the combinations of text and executable code—can be integrated and made compatible with an existing publisher's infrastructures and workflows for monograph publishing. We will be trying out various computational publishing tools to create this prototype, including Curvenote, Quarto, Jupyter Notebook, JupyterLab, and Jupyter Book.

As this Pilot has seen a changing set of partners and institutions involved during its gestation and as beyond these partners there are several connections to other projects and communities, we wanted to use this blogpost to introduce the communities that are currently involved in the Pilot and are contributing to the extended work plan that has been developed as part of this collaboration.

The Pilot Partners

COPIM – this Pilot Project is part of COPIM’s Work Package 6 (WP6) on Experimental Publishing and Reuse, and we will also be collaborating with WP5, the Thoth Open Dissemination System, and WP7, Archiving and Digital Preservation on the computational book prototype.

Open Book Publishers (OBP), founded in 2008, is a leading independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed monographs, edited collections, textbooks, critical translations and more. OBP are a non-profit social enterprise based in the UK and is run by academics. OBP is committed to making high-quality research available to every reader and all of the their books are freely available in open access formats (PDF, HTML and XML), as well as high-quality, affordably priced paperbacks, hardbacks, and ebooks. They do not charge their authors to publish with them and authors retain full copyright. Open Book Publishers is one of the partners on the COPIM project.

The TIB Open Science Lab supports the digital opening of science and culture by helping communities to adopt new methods and tools in their practice. Founded by Lambert Heller and Professor Ina Blümel in 2013, the lab is organised around two larger thematic clusters ‘OpenGLAM’ and ‘Open Research Information’, with several smaller thematic clusters, including one on collaborative publishing services and pipellines.

NFDI4Culture is a German Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage within the Nationale Forschungsdaten­infrastruktur (NFDI) that addresses research data on tangible and intangible cultural assets. They aim to establish a needs-based infrastructure for research data that serves their community of interest, ranging from architecture, art history and musicology to theatre, dance, film and media studies.

Collaborations with Linked Open Data and Enhanced Publications communities

Within this NFDI4Culture consortium connections have been made with various related projects that are looking at (architectural) digital heritage projects and Linked Open Data, including a working group (part of their Task Area 4 on Data Publication and Data Availability) looking at Enhanced Publications for architecture based on Linked Open Data, and the project Semantic Kompakkt (part of Task Area 1: Data Capture and Enrichment), which implements a suite of open source tools for semantic annotation of 3D cultural artefacts. Developed by an interdisciplinary team led by Prof Dr Ina Blümel at TIB, the proposed toolchain focuses on the annotation of 3D data (and other digital media) within a knowledge graph environment, so that 3D objects’ geometry, attendant metadata, as well as annotations remain searchable, while data interconnections are not lost.

Semantic Kompakkt has been developed in close cooperation with a specific use case of 3D heritage data in Germany in keeping with the principles of agile development and focusing on real world user needs. The Corpus der barocken Deckenmalerei in Deutschland (CbDD) is a heritage database of ceiling paintings from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. The prototype we will be creating as part of this Pilot Project will draw on some of the digital objects within this corpus.

Some of the infrastructures that we will want to integrate or test with the proof-of-concepts will be:

• Open Book Publishers (OBP) COPIM member – conventional open-source publishing infrastructure.

• ADA Pipeline – Multi-format publishing pipeline from the Open Science Lab, TIB – The ADA Pipeline supports the TIB Service – NextGen Books.

• TIB AV Portal – Scholarly semantic video repository and open-source toolkit from TIB

• MVP Semantic annotation for 3D cultural artefacts – Wikidata / Wikibase / Kompakkt / OpenRefine – Team NFDI4Culture TA 1 (TIB) – Demonstration video

• Thoth – COPIM partner. Book metadata platform

• Jupyter Notebook infrastructures - Although the final example has not yet been selected, such an infrastructure involves the use of: an editor, storage, and a runtime environment (virtual computer).