Two Scholarly Web-Agoras: The LogiLogi and Talia/Philospace Approaches Wybo Wiersma * University of Groningen wybo@logilogi.org Stefano David † Universit` a Politecnica delle Marche sdavid@delicias.dia.fi.upm.es 1 Introduction In this paper, we briefly introduce the LOGI LOGI and TALIA/P HILOSPACE systems, two systems that aim at helping scholars and philosphers in their research. They repre- sent two different approaches to combining traditional research in philosophy (paper and conversation based) with modern, web-based technologies. And as the systems are de- scribed in detail in Wiersma & Sarlo (2008) and David, Nucci & Piazza (2008), Morbidoni & Nucci (2008), we focus on their common- alities and especially their differences here. 2 LogiLogi LOGI LOGI is an hypertext web-platform de- veloped for LogiLogi.org by the LogiLogi Foundation 1 . It tries to combine the virtues of good conversations and the written word by providing a form of quick, informal publica- tion and annotation of short texts (so called Logis) via the web. Its central values are openness and quality of content. Contrarily to early websystems it does not make use of forum-threads (avoiding their many problems), but of tags and links that can also be added to logis by others than the original author. LOGI LOGI wants to meet the need of philosophers, students, and others for in- depth, quick-turnaround, high quality discus- sions without taking the fun out of it by mak- ing things too complicated. * The authors wish to thank Charl Linssen for his useful feedback on this paper. † This work has been partly supported by Discovery, an ECP 2005 CULT 038206 project under the EC eContentplus programme. 3 Talia and Philospace TALIA and P HILOSPACE are developed within the Discovery project 2 . TALIA is a distributed semantic digital library and pub- lishing system, that acts as a container for Sources, i.e., for Corpora of philosophers or texts on a certain philosophical topic, and for scholarly contributions. Each Talia node is dedicated to the writings of a philosopher and contributions on them, and will be part of the Talia Federation. On the other hand, P HILOSPACE is a desk- top application, that scholars can use in differ- ent ways: for example to browse one or more Talia nodes, to take personal or public notes on the sources they are reading, or to submit their works for publication in a Talia node. TALIA and P HILOSPACE will be tightly connected and together they will form a pow- erful framework, easily exploitable by schol- ars. 4 Commonalities Both LOGI LOGI and TALIA 3 are Free Soft- ware developed in Ruby, and on top of Ruby on Rails, a web development framework that makes creating web applications faster and easier 4 . The intended users for both platforms are philosophers, scholars, students, and people interested in philosophy, and their central use- cases are reading, publishing, navigating and annotating texts 5 . Although their prospective users are about the same, there are some differences in focus and aims, that we will discuss next.