CLIC Consortium Electronic Journal Project
Overview
CLIC is a collaborative project in electronic publishing involving Cambridge University, Leeds University, Imperial College and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Broadly speaking, the project aims to produce an electronic version of the Royal Society of Chemistry's flagship journal Chemical Communications.Chemistry, by its nature, lends itself to the hypertext format, for instance molecular structures cannot be satisfactorily represented on a 2-d printed page. Ideally one would like to be able to interact with molecular structures : zooming in on a region of interest, rotating the molecule or retrieving data.
Work At Leeds : SGML to HTML Conversion
The RSC's DTD, may be viewed most conveniently using Earl Hood's dtd2html conversion tool. This allows hypertext navigation of an SGML DTD, and perhaps most usefully with conversion tools for DTDs in mind, has an option to produce a tree structure for the DTD. Development of the DTD to include figures, tables, maths and chemical markup is under way.
An SGML-HTML converter has been written using CoST, which deals reasonably well with most of the features of the articles supplied to us so far by the RSC. The graphical objects are supplied as gifs.
A summary of the work done at Leeds on the CLIC project in Year 1 is available.
SGML-HTML on-the-fly
The thinking behind on-the-fly conversion is that there need only be one archive, from which one can generate the articles for the user in whatever form necessary. Considering the pace of developments in browser technology and HTML and also the volume of data which makes up issues of Chemical Communications, the maintenance of a separate HTML archive would be unmanageable.The conversion process is initiated by a cgi-bin script, which runs when a user selects an article to view from the Graphical Abstracts page. This script executes a simple UNIX pipeline which parses the SGML instance using sgmls and then converts the output stream to HTML using CoST.
Two issues from 1996 have been used to illustrate a possible model for future the on-the-fly delivery of Chemical Communications.
ISSUE 3 and ISSUE 4 are available on-the-fly !
SGML
An example of an SGML instance is also available, conforming to the RSC's Document Type Definition.Information on SGML is widely available on the Web. A good starting point is the SGML Web Page, provided by SoftQuad and the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Electronic Journals
- The World-Wide Web Virtual Library : Electronic Journals, has a fairly comprehensive searchable index.
- Chemistry Servers and Resources (via Theoretical Chemistry, University of Regensburg) - for specifically chemistry e-journals.
Other CLIC Progress Reports (CLIC Members only)
The work at Leeds is being done by Dr B.J.Whitaker, Mr A.J.Cole and, Dr C.J.Hildyard.
Last updated : October 2, 1996