Mark Reid has stepped up and created a comment system for ICML papers which Greger Linden has tightly integrated.
My understanding is that Mark spent quite a bit of time on the details, and there are some cool features like working latex math mode. This is an excellent chance for the ICML community to experiment with making ICML year-round, so I hope it works out. Please do consider experimenting with it.
A backlink to Mark’s post.
That’s great.
It would be a very good idea to integrate a comments system to existing tools like CiteSeer in order to create some kind of scientific social network
Well done! Hurray!
One thing I find particularly interesting is that this provides a way to post corrections for conference papers. Without this kind of system, it can be very hard to publicize such corrections.
Regarding the suggestion above to integrate this with existing search tools:
That is a great idea and I’m sure there are many different ways to approach it. Here’s one idea. When people click on a paper name in Google Scholar search results they could be taken to a web page created by ICML rather than taken directly to the PDF. That web page could show the comments (or a link to the comments) along with a link to the PDF.
Here’s an example of how that sort of thing works in Google Scholar. Search for “observations on overlap” in Google Scholar. The top result is a 2001 paper by Shriberg in an ISCA conference. Clicking the top result takes the browser to a web page on the ISCA web site which has information about the paper and a link to the PDF. The way this works is that ISCA provides XML metadata about each paper to the Google Scholar crawler, and this includes the URL of the web page (and also the URL of the PDF, so that the search engine can use the full contents of the PDF). I helped set this up for ISCA last year.
It might be possible to do this in CiteSeer as well. I don’t have any experience with CiteSeer.
Continuing my comment above:
There are multiple copies of some ISCA papers around the web in different locations — for example, on author’s home pages. However, clicking on an ISCA paper’s name in Google Scholar search results normally takes people to the paper’s web page on the ISCA web site regardless of what other locations on the web the paper can be found at. (Likewise for the IEEE and various other publishers.) This behavior would be useful if the paper’s web page linked to comments, since it would make the comments harder to miss. It works this way becasue the metadata ISCA provides to Google Scholar results in the search engine viewing the ISCA web site as the authoritative source for the paper.