Status
At this moment, the WEBook initiative is in its first, content assembly and structuring phase:
- the WEBook still needs more feedback from the community, in order to make its goals clear, to find an appropriate way of working, and to make sure it caters to the needs of the robotics community.
- its current contents and index are being produced by an ad hoc Editorial Board, kindly sponsored by EURON, the European Robotics Research Network.
The second phase in the development of the WEBook will add contributions from the whole robotics community, and provide tools and support for an open review and contribution work flow. This should lead to more complete coverage and higher quality of the WEBook material, to the extent that the WEBook should become the primary source for PhD level robotics courses worldwide.
The third phase will add semantic tags to the material, defined and structured in an semantic web for robotics. This semantic infrastructure should allow context-dependent “views” on the WEBook material, as well as support for non-educational activities such as: suggesting reviewers for research proposals or paper review; data mining on the web sites of robotics research institutes; advanced web search; etc.