At the MarkLogic User Conference, Darin McBeath of Elsevier asked the question what would you do if you were the publisher? How would you present an article? How would you render figures and references? What would you do if you were in control?
To answer, Darin showed some very cool examples of cutting across articles to present figures in new ways, a really cool interactive reference information browsing interface and a new take on the word cloud within an article to analyze article content.
And it was all done with XQuery. The source XML is stored in a MarkLogic Server instance and served up via XQuery powered web services. Each demo was then executed with XQuery running on another instance of MarkLogic that got the content from the first and, using XQuery, presented the new versions of the article from the source XML. Darin said that each demo was just a few lines of code and didn't take any more than a couple of days to complete. Very nice!
But what's really cool is that Elsevier is giving everyone the access to the same tools and a chance to make a new article presentation in the ... (drumroll please) ... Article 2.0 contest!
Check out this super cool idea: you get access to source XML content and, using XML tools like XQuery, you create your own idea of how an academic research article should be displayed. How would you present an article? Its really up to you. And with prize money at stake you can bet you won't be alone in showing how some new ideas can shake up scientific publishing.
Check out the full details here.
It all starts in September so you have plenty of time to plan your XQuery masterpiece . . . and Discovering XQuery can help with some examples of how to transform and render XML, how to grab some content from the web and present it, how to enrich content to power cool displays and a tutorial on how to get started with my favorite XQuery engine, MarkLogic Server.
Good luck and happy coding,
Matt
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