Steve,

I answered part of your note earlier but missed the other comments. More comments on your comments below.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steve Hitchcock
> Sent: 14 May 2008 17:20
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Semantic Web (was RE: Google, OAI and the IRs)
> 
> At 15:16 14/05/2008, John Smith wrote:
>
>
> >They [virtual journals] have editorial boards (or equivalent groups) that choose
> items
> >for subject relevance but do not necessarily judge formal quality
> >leaving that to the original journal/publishers. VJAS only
> chooses
> >from a limited range of primary publications but there is not
> reason
> >why a virtual journal should be so limited. The point I was
> making
> >was that the items listed are chosen by human subject experts
> rather
> >than keyword seeking software.
> 
> Or more simply, apply an aggregator to the RSS feeds from the
> selected source journals, keyword 'superconductivity'. You could
> probably fine tune that to get a good approximation of VJAS.

No, it would miss useful items and flag up irrelevant items. It does not understand the subject it simply keyword matches. It certainly would miss items in related subject areas that were relevant but used slightly different keyword sets. By sticking to a selected subset of journals you effectively cheat because you are using the human expertise of the producers of those journals but claiming subject skill for your program. A true virtual journal (because it uses human experts) would be able to find relevant articles in unexpected places and make value judgements about non-refereed material. 


> In the meantime I believe we are more likely to need current
> awareness filters for OA repository content, where we can see
> emerging critical masses of content in areas of interest, than we
> are
> to need overlay journals.

And I believe that until you have captured the concept of 'understanding' in software it will be limited and brittle, missing important items, producing noise and incapable of serendipity.

Regards,

John.