Creating links into the future
We are approaching an era where research materials will be stored more and more as digital resources on the World Wide Web. This of course will enable easier access to online publications. As the number of electronic publications expands, it will, however, become a challenge for individuals to find related or relevant papers. Related papers could be papers written by the same team of authors or by one of the authors, or even papers that deal with the same topic but were written by other authors. This, of course, raises the issue of linking to papers forward in time, or as we call it "links into the future". To be concrete, while reading a paper written in the year 1980, it would be nice to know if the same author has written another related paper in 1990's or if the same author has written a paper earlier, all this without making an explicit search. Based on the ascertained interest of a person reading a particular paper from a digital repository, an auto-suggestion facility could be useful to indicate papers in the same area, category and subject that might potentially be of interest to the reader. One is typically interested in finding related papers by the same author or by one of the authors of a paper. This feature can be implemented in two ways. The first is by creating links from this paper to all the relevant papers and updating it periodically for new papers appearing on the World Wide Web. Another way is by going through the references of all papers appearing on the WWW. Based on the references, one can create mutual links to the papers that are referred to. In this paper, we focus on offering personalised services beyond standard global access. We explore means of identifying the relevance (or relatedness) of papers. A related paper can mean different things to different people as explained above. Ideally, related papers are found and made accessible using links into the future that could be customised to suit the needs of individual users. In this paper, we will focus on a subset of the problem. We explore links into the future in the context of a particular journal which has existed for the past 13 years with over 1500 published papers. We discuss problems that arise in this restricted context while providing details of partial implementations. We plan to pursue our ideas in a more general setting in future implementations.
links into the future typed-link annotations citation citation index similarity