https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/ Essays by Rob Schrauwen, former Chief Content Architect at Elsevier, on content standards, XML, data models and the history of making science machine-readable. en https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/bloodlines-and-given-names.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/bloodlines-and-given-names.html Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000 What tagging given names tells us about company history (and about data modeling) https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/books-in-a-journals-database.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/books-in-a-journals-database.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Filling coverage gaps doesn't make a good data product if the underlying model is built for journals https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/is-an-editorial-an-editorial.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/is-an-editorial-an-editorial.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Model the content, not the words – the central lesson of content modelling, applied to document types https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/twenty-years-tag-by-tag.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/twenty-years-tag-by-tag.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The printed XML documentation that standardised scientific publishing – and what comes after it https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/data-cleansing-vs-laundering.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/data-cleansing-vs-laundering.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The principle of faithful exhibit capture – and why correcting the input is the wrong answer https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/content-modelling.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/content-modelling.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The central lesson from thirty years of practice – model what the content says, not what the world should look like https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/profile-ready-entities.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/profile-ready-entities.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Why technical entity definitions and user-facing profile pages don't always map one-to-one https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/abstracts-en-vogue.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/abstracts-en-vogue.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Decades of neglect in the secondary database – now amplified by AI https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/validation-by-the-producer.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/validation-by-the-producer.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A principle learned the hard way in the 1990s – and still worth repeating https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/cpld-and-history.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/cpld-and-history.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A new NISO standard prompts a look at thirty years of content standards – and what comes next https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/acting-on-errata.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/acting-on-errata.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A broadcast correction from the paper era – and why databases should actually apply it https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/keep-an-eye-on-the-prize.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/keep-an-eye-on-the-prize.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The arguments used to justify each technology transition are usually things we could already do – the real reasons lie elsewhere https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/data-products-and-quality.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/data-products-and-quality.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Measuring capability quality instead of data product quality is how we fool ourselves https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/mother-of-all-metrics.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/mother-of-all-metrics.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 How long does it take to find a data error? That number is too low – and it reveals a deeper problem https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/beauty-of-minigraphs.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/beauty-of-minigraphs.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A worked example showing what goes wrong with a single XML file – and how minigraphs fix it https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/data-mottos.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/data-mottos.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Some short rules that have guided content and data work for decades – and why ISO standards often violate them https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/content-modernization.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/content-modernization.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The general mindset is towards systems modernization – but users are waiting for modernized content https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/two-dimensions-of-content.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/two-dimensions-of-content.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Analytics and presentation impose completely different requirements on the same data https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/minigraphs.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/minigraphs.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A canvas plus annotations – a better way to structure scholarly content https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/exhibit-a.html https://mrrob.mijnweb.site/posts/exhibit-a.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000 How a PhD photograph explains probabilistic knowledge representation