The Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) has building large databases (including paleontological) on the geology of the ocean floor and is currently presenting research results in electronic proceedings that will soon replace paper publications. Palaeontologia Electronica (PE) has pioneered and produced an all-electronic paleontological journal with no paper equivalent.
The publication and distribution of electronic data and scholarly papers are no longer the cutting edge of publishing technology; the cutting edge now moves to the next generation of electronic documents. The wide experience gathered in ODP and PE, from the collection of drilled cores and data, through preliminary reports to scholarly publication, has provided the historical background. The next generation of electronic publications will include refinement of some of the present elements supported by technological improvements to create a product that meets the full spectrum of needs of the scientific community.
The goals for the final product should include the creation of a truly dynamic platform for the exchange of information and ideas; the permanent, long-term archive of published materials and the data on which they are based; improved world-wide access; and a realistic and improved presentation of text, data, graphics, and other media.
ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is the primary standard for coding text used on almost all computers and printers, but is very limited in the number and type of characters available for use.
Browser: The software that allows a reader to find locations on the WWW.
HTML: HyperText Markup Language. This is a description language (based on SGML) that allows different browsers to see the same document. Unfortunately, not all browsers are equal, not all platforms or computers are standardized, so no one sees exactly the same document. Only the content is the same.
Home page: The entry point for each web site or server.
Internet: A worldwide network of computers. Not a destination, but a means to reach a destination.
PDF: Acrobat Portable Document Format.
SGML: Standard Generalized Markup Language. This is a much more sophisticated language (more than HTML) used to define the structure of a document. Any document has a set of common elements, titles, paragraphs, list, etc. These elements can be defined and labelled for automated indexing, footnotes, or cross-references.
URL: Uniform Resource Locators (the address of a given file on the WWW)
WWW: World Wide Web. From the World Wide Web Initiative, a cooperative organization originally developed in 1990 at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland.
XML: Extensible Markup Language. This language is a subset of both SGML and HTML. It is one of the current Great Hopes of electronic publishing, as it promises to offer the best of both of the other two languages.
Jennifer Pattison Rumford, Ocean Drilling Program, TAMU,
College Station, TX 77845-9547
William R. Riedel, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD,
La Jolla, CA 92093-0220.