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Date: | Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:19 +0100 |
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> No. You can't review articles.
What???? We can, and do, all the time. You may really mean we cannot
(without some cost) administer this process.
> You can't provide easy searching and access
> to all articles in an area.
This is certainly something that should be provided a t a reasonable
cost by the correct type of organisation.
But in pure maths this has only ever been seriously attempted by Math
Reviews and Zentralblatt; and both of these, although naturally having
close connections with publishing, are clearly part of the mathematical
community and employi at senior levels academic mathematicians rather
than "publishers".
I have no idea if this yet another way in which maths is "different"
but that concept is not at all new to me; it is a daily part of my
working life as I represent the species in an institution which
necessarily (and very effectively) standardises anything that moves
(or at least anything that costs money).
I do know that maths is very different in the requirements it makes of
intra-document search engines. This is one, of many, reasons why the
idea of MathML came to fruition (NOTE: I am not claiming that MathML,
as is, has delivered what is needed in this area). And again, here,
it seems unlikely that, even given the right languages/tools,
publishers will be able to provide useful added-value in this area
without using specialised mathematicians to encode documents.
chris
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