Overview

SALT (Semantically Annotated LaTeX) is an authoring framework for creating semantic documents for scientific publications. SALT comprises two layers:
  • a syntactic layer, and
  • a semantic layer.
The syntactic layer represents the bridge between the semantic layer and the hosting environment, i.e. LaTeX. It defines and series of new LaTeX commands, while making use of some of the already existing ones in order to capture the logical structure of the document and the semantics present in the publication's content. As a remark, we chose LaTeX because is one of the most widely used writing environments in the scientific world. In a similar way, the SALT framework can be used also together with, for example, Microsoft Word.

The semantic layer is formed by a set of three ontologies:
  • The Document Ontology -- modeling the logical structure of the document,
  • The Rhetorical Ontology -- modeling the rhetorical structure of the publication, and
  • The Annotation Ontology -- linking the rhetorics captured in the document's content and the document itself; it also models the publication's shallow metadata.
SALT is available in two flavors, differentiated by the concepts present in the Rhetorical Ontology:
  • SALT Light -- models only the argumentation side, including Rhetorical Blocks and claims
  • SALT Full -- comprises the entire model, including Rhetorical Relations between claims and suports and between nuclei and satellites

Usage

SALT is recommended by the following workshops:
  • The 3rd Semantic Wiki Workshop (SemWiki 2008) - hosted by the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008)
  • 4th Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web (SFSW 2008) - hosted by the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008)