Last month at Frankfurt Book Fair, David Worlock chaired a thought-provoking panel. The panelists were Dr Sven Fund, CEO of De Gruyter; Jason Markos, Director of Knowledge Management for Wiley; Andreas Blumauer, CEO of Semantic Web Company and Dr Timo Hannay, CEO of MacMillan Digital Science.

David’s initial premise was that in STM publishing today people are thinking about knowledge not books, journals, articles etc. That includes, he said, knowledge pathways;

Unstructured data. As a writer I hate that term. I remember the first time I heard reference to it; sitting in a meeting and technical people were talking about all the unstructured content that publishers produce. Huh? How could they be speaking about articles as unstructured? If anyone has made it through kindergarten they have learned that they must follow a linguistic pattern or “structure” in order to communicate effectively. But in the lexicon of geekdom, any article, picture, powerpoint,