SALT: Semantically Annotated Latex

RyoScript · May 15, 2012

Is anyone in the Zotero community familiar with SALT? It's a tool to add semantic annotations to either Latex or MS Word documents. I have not been able to get it to work properly and (after writing but not hearing back from its developers, who I think are based in Ireland), I am not sure it is still active. However, I've looked at their code and found it relatively easy to create a few Latex macros which achieve the effect they are aiming at: namely, to create special annotation environments which may or may not be printed in visual text (they can be suppressed while generated a document), but can always be scanned by external tools. I'm taking an existing article and putting it in this format to add to my library. SALT annotations include things like "motivation", "claim", etc., which are pretty self-explanatory. Annotations which are printed can be set off by using different colors, or printed in page margins, etc. It seems like a good way to create a kind of "open-edit" framework where people can add their own annotations to existing papers; like responding to a "claim" section by observing that the text does not actually support the claim. Anyhow, if there are several SALT-like documents available I could start a group around them, but I'm wondering if anyone else is using or has heard about these techniques. Thanks.

noksagt · May 15, 2012

The developers read every thread, including the one you posted last week. No response usually means that nobody has anything of value to contribute just at that moment. SALT last updated their style file in 2007 & was developed when the author was a graduate student. I didn't see the java source, despite them using GPL libraries. It seems fairly abandoned to me & I don't think it took off (or was meant to). In any case, this seems tangentially related to Zotero (at best).

RyoScript · May 19, 2012

Thank you. I would observe that my second post did actually receive a comment, one which was not insignificant: first, it demonstrates that SALT is indeed not on the radar screen, and, second, the suggestion that an annotation framework is "tangential" to a citation framework is worth discussing. I think it is obvious that Semantic Annotation is a good idea (I won't bother to rehearse the reasons, because I sketched them earlier). In terms of grabbing citations, annotations can help tools like Zotero to "scrape" references off of text documents, and also to annotate the reference itself, in the sense of commenting on the role which a reference plays in a document. I have endeavored to retrofit my own articles with such a framework, and I would like to add them to my Zotero library along with the important referenced articles and some tool to represent their interrelations on-screen. If other Zotero users are doing something similar with their own libraries, I would appreciate such info because it might lead to a standard, however informal.

iloveyellow · January 24, 2017

Dear RyoScript - what have you found about semantic annotation now? I'm interested in this, since I'm a librarian doing special collections in Zotero, and I would like to offer my patrons some extended features including searchable and semantic annotations in their reference library. So I'd be extremely happy if you would please share any insight you might have gained so far. Thanks :)