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Electronic publishing for academics: geology and physics in Russian network
for natural sciences

PAVEL PLETCHOV2; ALEXEY KRASHENINNIKOV1,*; ALEKSEI SELIVERSTOV1; SERGEI
TRUSOV2; VADIM USTIANSKY3

1 Physics Department, M.V.Lomonosov Moscow State University
119992, Moscow, GSP-2, Leninskie Gory, Russian Federation
e-mail: avs@phys.web.ru; acrush@phys.web.ru
2 Geology Department, M.V.Lomonosov Moscow State University
119992, Moscow, GSP-2, Leninskie Gory, Russian Federation
e-mail: pavel@cs.ru; serg@students.web.ru
3 Sternberg Astronomical Institute, M.V.Lomonosov Moscow State University
119992, Moscow, GSP-2, Leninskie Gory, Russian Federation
e-mail: ustiansk@sai.msu.ru
* Corresponding author: acrush@phys.web.ru

Electronic publications have proven to be crucial for supplying the
scientific community with up-to-date research results and instruments for
both education and research. Present work summarizes the experience of
development and maintenance of two natural science oriented servers and
their integration with related databases and web-resources. The Russian
network for natural sciences pursues the aim of providing the scientific
society of the CIS states with high quality tools for peer-reviewed
scientific publishing in Russian and other languages with full public
availability and an open archive of handbooks and textbooks on geology and
physics. Web-based software for scientific calculations, forums, various
information services and an ample catalogue of related scientific resources
combined with search and classification tools are also presented on the
Network. Search forms for geology and physics resources freely distributed
among interested third-party sites and means of mutual information exchange
based on XML serve the aim of deep integration of scientific resources.
Designed and launched with the support of Moscow State University in 1997
and 2000 respectively, the Geo.Web.Ru and Phys.Web.Ru servers provide users
with thousands of scientific and popular books, articles and sketches on
physics (over 2,200 documents) and geology (over 4,700 documents). The
servers are by now among the top-ranked resources for Russian-speaking
scientific auditorium according to usage statistics.

Keywords: Portals; Catalogues; Search; Resource Integration



INTRODUCTION
Electronic publications have proven to be crucial for supplying the
scientific community with up-to-date research results and instruments for
both education and research. The development of the coming generation of
scientists requires a deep involvement of students in the scientific
information exchange. For beginners it is also important to get the full
picture of modern scientific "mise en scene". This can only be achieved by
combining the latest reports with ample reference sources and
demonstrations presented in the native language. Providing a wide range of
open access resources prepared by experts could foster the intellectual
growth of future scientists.
This approach was adopted for development of the natural science
oriented servers: "About Geology" (http://geo.web.ru) since 1997 and
Scientific-educational server on Physics (http://phys.web.ru) since 2000.
The projects, as conceived from the beginning, aim at providing the
scientific audience with high quality publications submitted by
professionals in science and education, with educational content such as
textbooks and glossaries.
Historically, the geological server has several names, one of which
provides a deeper understanding of its concept: the Russian Virtual
Geoscience Network. This implies the effort of the developers to create a
portal able to unite the many aspects and realizations of electronic Earth
science resources. Later, with the development of the physics branch, the
complex has evolved into the Russian Network for Natural Sciences as stated
in the header. Moreover, for every scientist it is very important to get
the broadest possible view of the investigated problem. Hence, there is a
high demand for relevant topical search engines that filter off the
background noise level documents resulting from common vocable search
requests. This problem may be solved by creating a topical hierarchical
resource catalogue combined with means of indexing and search. This has
been done for the first time in the area of Earth sciences and physics.
Also, it is well-known that in most cases the pre-publication work of
a scientist usually includes wide discussions of preliminary results, which
in modern world substantiates the demand for professional communication
tools such as forums. Such are provided to users at the geology server and
are prepared for launch at the physics server. As for educational
component, the servers focus on electronic publishing of popular articles
and textbooks including those compiled of lectures read at the faculties
and departments of M.V.Lomonosov Moscow State University and other higher
education institutes.
The has evolved from There still remain a number of sections that
appeared then: a forum for students, a mirror of a bard song collection,
etc. But just as it has previously happened to Yahoo!, very soon the
collection of hyperlinks grew beyond the level of just a "See also" page
and demanded a development of rubricator and search engine.
In 1997 the authors of the Educational network project [1] (then a
website devoted to students of the Geology Department of Moscow State
University and a collection of links to geological resources) have applied
for a Russian Foundation for Basic Research grant. The aim was to create a
tool for automated collecting and sorting of references to various
geological and geophysical databases and sites, which could be used by
virtually any scientist worldwide. In the project called Russian Virtual
Network for Earth Sciences a web-enabled object model has been applied to
organization of Earth science information resource for the first time.
In 2000 the physics section of www.nature.ru Scientific Network, the
latter also developed with active participation of the authors, peeled away
to form the Phys.Web.Ru Scientific-Educational server on physics [2].
Based on similar software and ideology, the servers have united to form the
Russian Network for Natural Sciences.

USER AND AUTHOR/EDITOR INTERFACES AND EDITORIAL POLICIES
The user interface is developed using a modular structure to allow
same script files to serve both readers and chief editors. The
capabilities of the interface depend on user role, i.e. the set of rights
the user is vested with by server administrator or automatically. When
entitled additional rights new components become available to user. At
maximum, it's possible to create and edit article text (including LaTeX-
based formulae typing) and meta-information, publish articles for common
access, change the rubricator section names and their structure, edit
keywords, user's personal information, user roles and availability of
special administrative applications.
The editorial policies of the servers differ in details, but have
common features besides requirements of legislation currently in force.
Scientific articles and reviews published have to convey scientific
knowledge, contain original results or references to such. It is advisable
that the author be professional in science, teaching or scientific
journalism. The copyright belongs to the author and the publisher is
granted the permission to reprint.

BASIC DETAILS
Technologically, both of the presented servers represent a three-level
architecture. Upper level consists of a necessary number of external
interfaces for data representation, import and export. Intermediate level
contains the common information and operations bus with a standard unified
interface. Lower level consists of an arbitrary number of data storage and
processing units (devices). Such architecture has many advantages for
large project development, of which one of the most important is the
scalability. Additional servers may be plugged in on the run to maintain
uniform load distribution and overall performance of the system.

Light front-end server: Interfaces + Static and Cached pages

Common Unified Data Bus

Auxiliary File Server Back-end Database servers cluster
Images, PDFs, spreadsheets Object metadata, article text, keywords,
rubrication sections etc.

FIGURE 1. Data storage and processing architecture of the servers.

The documents in the network are supposed to be viewable to all users
virtually independent on the software they dispose. Therefore, the general
representation is based on standard HTML with automatically pre-generated
GIF insets of LaTeX formulae and other mathematical constructions. In
certain cases PDF files of papers are additionally presented as print-
versions.

DATA CLASSIFICATION, SEARCH AND REPRESENTATION FOR NATURAL SCIENCE
RESOURCES
During the recent years a unified basis for data classification, its
search and representation in the Internet are quested. Very frequently geo-
information systems (GIS) or cartographic systems are proposed for
geological data. However, there is an enormous amount of information unfit
for cartographic representation.
Practically all Earth science and physics information flows
represented in the Internet may be referred to the following types:
a) descriptive (articles, books, lectures);
b) event-related (monitoring, news, conferences);
c) debatable (considerations, questions/answers);
d) reference (databases, catalogs, libraries);
e) interactive resources (simulations, specialized calculations,
demonstration programs).
Descriptive, event-related and debatable information flows are served
well with conventional content management systems (CMS). Such systems are
implemented in many scientific content servers. For example, such Russian-
language based CMS maintain in part the information flow processing in
http://Geo.Web.Ru and http://Phys.Web.Ru. The data of types a), b), c) can
be rendered in a 'pseudo-static' way which allows further integration to
the Internet by means of reference, indexing and search. Such integration
implies availability to various search engines such as global resource
crawlers, local search and internal navigation.
The information on servers is classified using a complex expandable
rubrication scheme including a linear branch for publication genre
(scientific articles, popular articles, news, annotated references, event
announcements and so on), a linear branch for glossary articles
(alphabetical) and a hierarchical subject-field tree. The editorial board
may introduce more rubrication branches if necessary, for example to sort
documents according to target audience. This helps the users to find
exactly what they want even if they do not know how to compose a yielding
search query. In practice it is convenient to select articles using both
branches (certain message types on certain subjects).
Local full-text search within the articles, glossaries, books and
other materials stored in the local databases of servers is based on
OpenFTS technology implementing the Generalized Search Tree (GiST) concept.
These have been developed expressly for Scientific Network member servers
and are included in the PostgreSQL since v. 7.3.
The first implementation of a system with additional dynamic links
between information objects is represented by the Russian Virtual
Geoscience Network (http://Geo.Web.Ru). For the first time, to our
knowledge, in the natural science area we have developed a complex of
search tools much simplifying the use of servers and easing the access to
related documents. Among such we should mention the dynamic hyperlink
model [1] where special simple markup rules allow the author to refer to
the latest and the most relevant data available on the Network. This is
achieved by treating some particular types of anchor tag's href attribute
as search queries handling a number of parameters including search
keywords, rubricator sections from which the search is requested, distance
between keywords in the target document, their position in the document and
more. Also, in cooperation with the Scientific Network (www.nature.ru) and
Russian Astronomy Network (www.astronet.ru) we have for the first time (at
least in Russia) developed a tool for selection-based searching. We
consider these as features of a prototype of unified specialized search
system at a national scale which can be interfaced with Semantic Web in the
future.
External search is based on X-Ware technology [3] - a modified search
engine of the www.rambler.ru portal - adapted for scientific term stemming,
morphology enabled search and topical catalogue based search. Both
internal and external search requests are handled with the same forms
available in every page of Phys.Web.Ru and Geo.Web.Ru.

RESOURCE INTEGRATION AND TOOLS FOR PROFESSIONALS
The servers of the Russian Network for Natural Sciences try to provide
their users with the broadest possible view of physics, geology and
geophysics. The means is probably the wide free distribution of search
forms allowing for search over all the resources included in the topical
catalogues of Geo.Web.Ru and Phys.Web.Ru. There is an active exchange of
publications between the two servers and with third-party resources such as
www.astronet.ru, www.nature.ru, www.exponenta.ru, etc.
The concept of Earth science and physics resource integration adopted
a self-registration approach combined with automated immediate error-
checking services and database update robots that help to keep the contents
actual. The registration processing included checking of formal
requirements imposed by the database structure and expert review of
resources submitted to avoid unsolicited non-topical (misleading) links.
The submitted information was then placed in queue and automatically
expired after two weeks if not accepted for use (inclusion) in the Network
by the experts. Expiry of long-down (unavailable for more than two weeks)
or for some reason irrelevant database records allowed to maintain
reasonable search performance and update rates on non-commercial web-
servers provided by the Geology and Physics Departments using the
institutional Internet-channel of the University. All errors including
expiry as well as any remarks made by the reviewer were automatically
reported to submitters by e-mail. The aim was to help authors improve
their resources and prepare them for inclusion in the Network, i.e. to
create a data representation scheme suitable for indexing with the
Network's crawler to make it available through a unified interface. Upon
acceptance the submitted resources were indexed and included in the
collection of records available for the search engine.
Several software tools have been developed for experts maintaining the
topical link-lists referring to geological or geophysical resources, where
all the corresponding database records are stored in the same pivot table.
Still the links can emerge in an arbitrary number of link-lists and be
classified using rubrication of any complexity. The same way the
references are periodically cron-checked for availability and removed if
unavailable for a long period of time unless such removal is explicitly
prohibited by the server administrator.
Integration with various databases and textual information resources
is further deepened by inclusion of auxiliary semantic links to relevant
documents and search queries in Geo.Web.Ru or Phys.Web.Ru from the database
records. For example, such links are provided to the users of the
Crystallographic Database for Minerals and their Structural Analogues
(http://database.iem.ac.ru/mincryst/, includes 2585 items), the "WWW-
Mincryst", part of the Russian Virtual Geoscience Network project. The
links normally lead to search pages resulting from an automatically
generated query including russian and english names of minerals, their
spatial symmetry groups, etc.
The geology server also provides its users with online scientific
calculation tools presented by numerous geological, petrological, and
thermodynamical programs with Web-interface. Among them are:
. Comagmat - a powerful complex of related programs developed to
calculate phase equilibria for dry and hydrous natural magmas
crystallization. (http://geo.web.ru/~kbs/)
. Geothermometers and geobarometers that calculate temperature and
pressure of mineral equilibria from the mineral's chemical composition
using various petrological models. (http://geo.web.ru/db/calc/)
. Regional mineralogy database - collection of 2000 minerals and 7000
corresponding finding sites (http://geo.web.ru/druza/)
. Meteorite database provides information about more than 1000
meteorites from Russian Academy of Science collection: meteorite
names, finding/fall locations, chemical composition and more
(http://geo.web.ru/db/meteorites/)
The set of instruments for the users of discussed servers also
includes such services as event scheduler (information on conferences and
schools held on a national or/and a global scale including publication of
selected proceedings: http://geo.web.ru/db/full_year.html and
http://phys.web.ru/db/full_year.html) and a hierarchical resource catalogue
(annotated links to related materials in Russian as well as in other
languages).
As for integration, the availability of different databases and
interactive resources on the Internet gives rise to both technical and
conceptual difficulties. The main problems include different (often
incomparable) structures of data, lack of standards for specialized
information representation, the 'variety' of database interfaces and
differences in tasks of information compilers. In the opinion of the
authors, development of auxiliary semantic links of different purposes
between data objects is a promising trend in the evolution of common
information space.

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLISHING, EDUCATION AND INSTITUTIONAL ARCHIVING
As conceived, the Geo.Web.Ru and Phys.Web.Ru provide the users with
high quality peer-reviewed scientific publications and reference data. The
news and popular articles are written by professionals in science and
education and reviewed by associates of Geology and Physics Departments of
Lomonosov Moscow University. In 2001 the Geology Department included the
Geo.Web.Ru server in the obligatory mailing list for PhD and professor
theses' abstracts. Currently the possibility of providing Phys.Web.Ru with
the status of the official e-prints server of the Physics Department is
discussed with the administration.
The administration of the Russian Network for Natural Sciences pays
much attention to development of the coming generation of scientists that
requires a deep involvement of students in the scientific information
exchange. The Network focuses on electronic publishing of textbooks
including those compiled of lectures read at the Faculties of Lomonosov
Moscow State University. The geology server has a specialized interface
for this task that classifies the lecture courses present on the server
into geological specializations (majors) and years of study
(http://geo.web.ru/db/edu/). By now there are 12 lecture courses, 10 full
textbooks and numerous tests on geological subjects and 13 lecture courses
and 10 full textbooks on physics and astronomy. The collections of
educational materials and demos are constantly expanded.

USAGE STATISTICS AND CONCLUSIONS
The contents of the Network for Natural Sciences are intensively
filled up with original articles submitted by independent authors and
permitted reprints of third-party materials. The dynamics of content
growth for 'All about Geology' server (geo.web.ru) is well illustrated with
Fig. 2. The content volume may be estimated as several tens of Megabytes
per server in plain text equivalent (excluding HTML tags and additional
files). Up to 5 Megabytes (1 Megabyte average) of textual information are
published every month by the staff and independent authors using the
central servers' databases only.

[pic]FIGURE 2. Geo.web.ru content database filling dynamics.

Usage statistics provided by Rambler's Top100
(http://top100.rambler.ru/, Figs. 3 and 4) show observable increase in
numbers of visitors and page hits per month. The falloffs observed
generally correspond to summer vacations period or occasional technical
problems with servers or internet-access lines. The trends show a gradual
increase of interest to the Russian Network for Natural Sciences.



[pic]
FIGURE 3. Geo.web.ru public resource usage statistics according to
Rambler's Top100. Dark blue curves showing visitor hosts (unique IPs), the
yellow - visiting users, and the light blue - number of pages (URLs)
requested per month.

[pic]
FIGURE 4. Phys.web.ru public resource usage statistics according to
Rambler's Top100. Dark blue curves showing visitor hosts (unique IPs), the
yellow - visiting users, and the light blue - number of pages (URLs)
requested per month.


The positive experience described above shows that virtual networks
uniting multiple resources around central content oriented servers are in
high demand among the scientists of the CIS and of the entire world. Still
remaining focused at Russian-speaking audience, given the presence of
native English speaking experts in the editorial boards the servers may be
expanded with English interfaces and English versions of publications to
improve the availability of the Network's resources therein to foreign
scientists. We conclude that the reported approach is well applicable to
electronic publishing for academics.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was partially supported by Russian Foundation for Basic
Research (project 03-07-90257).

NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Pletchov P.Yu. and Koshchug D.G. Educational network of the Geological
faculty of the Moscow State University. In IUGG XXII General Assembly,
Birmingham, UK, 1999.
2. Seliverstov A.V., Krasheninnikov A.P. Scientific-educational server on
physics Phys.Web.Ru. In Conference "Scientific Service in the Internet
2002", Novorossiysk, Russia, September 23-28, 2002, p.194 (in Russian).
3. I.E.Panchenko, A.V.Seliverstov, V.E.Ershov, I.V.Kutyrev, V.O.Ustiansky.
X-Ware platform: building scientific and educational sites, distributed
editorial boards and information systems. In Conference "Scientific
Service in the Internet 2003", Novorossiysk, Russia, September 24-29,
2003, p.309 (in Russian).
4. P.Pletchov, S.Trousov, D.Varlamov, K.Bychkov. Prototype of the logical
basis for geological data representation in Internet, In XXIII General
Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, Sapporo,
Japan, June 30, 2003 - July 11, 2003, vol.B, p.524.