Scholarly Communications must be Standards Compliant

In addressing how scholarly communications must transform in the digital age, I claimed in my last post that scholarly communications must be open. In this post, I argue that for scholarship to succeed in the digital age it must also be standards compliant.

What do I mean by standards-compliant scholarship?

I am not referring to disciplinary standards, but to the communication standards that have developed to maximize the value of information within the semantic web. The semantic web refers to information being structured for machine readability and interoperability. In short, if you want more human eyeballs to see it, you have to accommodate the computers that are now actively harvesting the Internet in sophisticated ways. 

Today, anything on the web that is not formatted for the semantic web is at risk of being discounted, under-utilized, or just ignored. Machine readability and interoperability are the basis for the semantic web, and scholarship that is not calibrated to the semantic web in these ways essentially surrenders its franchise (just as scholarship published in toll-access journals sacrifices literally billions of potential readers).

Knowledge today is social (literally and metaphorically), and information gains its citizenship in the broader community of discourse through metadata and XML schema. These identify and structure the knowledge to which they refer (see my longer post on the topic, here). Machines can thereby "know" something about the data they manipulate. Targeted data harvesters or granularly programmed queries can find knowledge prepared in this way.

For knowledge to flow optimally through the Internet, it must be "format agnostic" -- something impossible in printed communication. What does this mean? It means the information does not depend upon its layout on a page or other presentation structure. Instead, it depends upon its knowledge structure. (This is explained wonderfully within Michael Wesch's famous video).

Content that is format dependent (for presentation or layout) is not standards compliant in the digital age. Through XML schemas and open data protocols, knowledge stays flexible, agile, extractable -- readily piped into other documents, aggregated with other content streams, or remixed or repurposed.  Publications that are not format agnostic, that lack metadata, or that are not structured for extraction and syndication are not standards-compliant for digital communication. They will lack social uptake or semantic web automated discovery and repurposing because the information (however inherently valuable) has no real value to the sociality of knowledge online. Such publications restrict potential users from any experience of the information except in the original design format, effectively discounting the value of the information for others.

This kind of standards compliance might be compared to the requirement in traditional scholarship to documenting sources. We understand the need for explicit and standard references to cited literature. It will soon be just as critical for any publication to be semantic web-enabled. If it isn't interoperable and syndicatable, it will not be taken seriously -- or it won't be seen as taking itself seriously as knowledge. Not to prepare scholarship to interface with the semantic web will ultimately be comparable to preparing a manuscript but never formally publishing it. It could be digital and online, but it would be inconsequential.

And so, a bit ironically, scholarship in the digital age must simultaneously exist independent of format ("format agnostic"), but at the same time be formatted for the semantic web. This is not a contradiction; we are simply trading a kind of formatting once critical to scholarship (page layout, inclusion in a journal issue or book chapter) with a kind of formatting now more critical to scholarly communications (XML, RSS). 

Among the most important of these information standards today is RSS. Read about it in the next post in this series, where I explain that scholarly communications must be syndicated.