A presentation on smart content (what it is, how it is produced, why it is useful, and its relevance to the future of scholarly publishing) for the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Pre-Conference in Washington, D.C. on 2012-02-01.

1. Smart Content
Bradley P. Allen
Elsevier Labs
Presentation to AAP PSP Pre-Conference 2012
Washington, D.C.
2012-02-01 (revised version of 2012-02-21)

2. What is smart content?
• Smart content is content structured to make it
easier to do your work
– Discover it faster
– Understand it better
– Integrate it more cheaply with other solutions
2

3. Discovering
3

4. Discovering
4

5. Discovering

6. Understanding

7. Understanding

8. Understanding
8

9. Understanding
9

10. Understanding
10

11. Integrating
11

12. Creating smart content by adding structure
Asset
Metadata
Provenance
Concepts
and Trust
Usage Assertions
Citations
12

13. Creating smart content: asset metadata
Mandatory Pain Scoring at Triage Reduces Time to Analgesia
Jaideep Vazirani, Jonathan C. Knott, MBBS, PhD
From the Department of Emergency Medicine, Royal
Melbourne Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, Australia; and the Asset
Metadata
Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
Provenance
Concepts
Copyright © 2011 by the American College of Emergency and Trust
Physicians. doi:10.1016/j.annemergmed.2011.08.007
….
We found that mandatory pain scoring did not change the
frequency of analgesic administration. Baumann et al32
Usage Assertions
similarly found no increased use of analgesics after
improved documentation of pain through a template chart.
… Citations
32. Baumann BM, Holmes JH, Chansky ME, et al. Pain
assessments and the provision of analgesia: the effects of a
templated chart. Acad Emerg Med. 2007;14:47-52.
13

14. Creating smart content: concepts
Mandatory Pain Scoring at Triage Reduces Time to Analgesia
Jaideep Vazirani, Jonathan C. Knott, MBBS, PhD
From the Department of Emergency Medicine, Royal
Melbourne Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, Australia; and the Asset
Metadata
Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
Provenance
Concepts
Copyright © 2011 by the American College of Emergency and Trust
Physicians. doi:10.1016/j.annemergmed.2011.08.007
….
We found that mandatory pain scoring did not change the
frequency of analgesic administration. Baumann et al32
Usage Assertions
similarly found no increased use of analgesics after
improved documentation of pain through a template chart.
… Citations
32. Baumann BM, Holmes JH, Chansky ME, et al. Pain
assessments and the provision of analgesia: the effects of a
templated chart. Acad Emerg Med. 2007;14:47-52.
14

15. Creating smart content: assertions
Mandatory Pain Scoring at Triage Reduces Time to Analgesia
Jaideep Vazirani, Jonathan C. Knott, MBBS, PhD
From the Department of Emergency Medicine, Royal
Melbourne Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, Australia; and the Asset
Metadata
Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
Provenance
Concepts
Copyright © 2011 by the American College of Emergency and Trust
Physicians. doi:10.1016/j.annemergmed.2011.08.007
….
We found that mandatory pain scoring did not change the
frequency of analgesic administration. Baumann et al32
Usage Assertions
similarly found no increased use of analgesics after
improved documentation of pain through a template chart.
… Citations
32. Baumann BM, Holmes JH, Chansky ME, et al. Pain
assessments and the provision of analgesia: the effects of a
templated chart. Acad Emerg Med. 2007;14:47-52.
15

16. Creating smart content: citations
Mandatory Pain Scoring at Triage Reduces Time to Analgesia
Jaideep Vazirani, Jonathan C. Knott, MBBS, PhD
From the Department of Emergency Medicine, Royal
Melbourne Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, Australia; and the Asset
Metadata
Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne,
Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
Provenance
Concepts
Copyright © 2011 by the American College of Emergency and Trust
Physicians. doi:10.1016/j.annemergmed.2011.08.007
….
We found that mandatory pain scoring did not change the
frequency of analgesic administration. Baumann et al32
Usage Assertions
similarly found no increased use of analgesics after
improved documentation of pain through a template chart.
… Citations
32. Baumann BM, Holmes JH, Chansky ME, et al. Pain
assessments and the provision of analgesia: the effects of a
templated chart. Acad Emerg Med. 2007;14:47-52.
16

17. Methods for adding structure to content
Manual Automated
Annotation Curation Modeling Extraction
Classification Regression Clustering
Collaborative Topic Entity Relation
filtering Modeling Extraction Extraction
• Very mature, but • Variable degrees of maturity, but huge • Language-driven,
hard to scale strides through machine learning research so challenging to
• Crowdsourcing is and practical application on the consumer generalize and
a possible solution, Internet scale
but quality control • Data-driven, so the more data the better • Crucial to realize
is a challenge • Models can be used to build applications, promise of ease of
can be a new type of publication integration
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18. Elsevier’s approach
• Embrace linked data principles while leveraging
our existing content production workflow and
infrastructure
– Find the right balance between production/QA and
online delivery
• Leverage partners for content enhancement and
knowledge organization
– Reuse Web-standard vocabularies, taxonomies,
ontologies and entity resources where possible
• Start with asset metadata and subjects
• Deliver benefits across the complementary use
cases of researcher and practitioner
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19. What is linked data?
“Linked data is just a term for how to publish
data on the web while working with the web.
And the web is the best architecture we
know for publishing information in a hugely
diverse and distributed environment, in a
gradual and sustainable way.”
Jeni Tennison. 2010. Why Linked Data for data.gov.uk?
http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/140
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20. The four principles of linked data
1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up
those names
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide
useful information, using the standards
4. Include links to other URIs, so that they can
discover more things
Tim Berners-Lee. 2006. Linked Data
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
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21. Today, authors turn research into content
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22. Linked data can be extracted from content
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23. New content can be created as views over linked data
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24. Soon, research will become linked data directly
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25. Linked data will be used to create models
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26. Models in turn create more linked data
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27. Smart content stitches scholarship into the Web
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28. Challenges in publishing smart content
• URI and namespace management and
governance
• Globalization/localization of knowledge
organization systems
• Registries for resolving identity of named
entities for accreditation, provenance and
trust
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29. What smart content means for the publishing business
“Our new knowledge does not consist of a
careful set of works that have passed through a
series of gates. … Our new knowledge is not
even a set of works. It is an infrastructure of
connection.”
David Weinberger. 2011. Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That
the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest
Person in the Room Is the Room, Basic Books, New York, NY
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30. The digital library is a horseless carriage
Print era: 1600s - Digital Library era: Platform-as-a-
1980 1980 – 2010s Service era: 2010s
• Packaged as • Packaged as • Packaged as
books and books and apps and APIs
articles articles • Digitally
• Physically • Digitally distributed
distributed distributed • Access and
• Access and • Access and discovery
discovery discovery through social
through through search networks
libraries engines
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31. Filtering is moving into the Web
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32. Metrics are moving into the Web
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33. Content publishing is becoming business intelligence
Surajit Chaudhuri, Umeshwar Dayal, and Vivek Narasayya. 2011. An
overview of business intelligence technology. Commun. ACM 54, 8
(August 2011), 88-98. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978542.1978562
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34. The printing press is now the data center
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35. Publishers are becoming hubs, then platforms
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36. Smart content is a bridge to the future of publishing
• Smart content allows publishers to create new
products and services through structuring
content for better discovery, insight and utility
– The value is in the structure, not the content
– Creating that structure is hard work
– The kind of hard work that publishers have
traditionally focused on
• New consumer Internet businesses are using
open source software and the cloud to add
structure to content today… quickly and on the
cheap
• Publishers and societies both large and small can
use the same techniques to follow suit
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37. The skills to do this are increasingly accessible
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38. Things you can do now
• Expose existing asset and subject metadata as
linked data in Web pages to aid discovery
– E.g. schema.org
• Embrace and extend authoritative ontologies
and repositories on the Web
• Collaborate in building needed authoritative
resources for identity resolution and metrics
– E.g. ORCID
38

39. Thank you
Bradley P. Allen
b.allen@elsevier.com