The Adventures with Components.js

Story that spans nearly 5 years

• April 2017: Birth of the idea
• January 2022: Acceptance of journal article

Components.js: semantic dependency injection framework

{
  "@context": [...],
  "@id": "urn:my-package:myInstance",
  "@type": "QueryEngine",
  "actors": [
    { "@type": "SelectOperator" },
    { "@type": "UnionOperator" },
    { "@type": "ConstructOperator" },
    ...
  ]
}

→ Instantiation into JavaScript objects at runtime

April 2017: Birth of the idea

• WWW Conference in Perth, Australia (April 3 - Apr 7)
• Ruben V and I came up with idea of improving reproducibility of experiments
• → unambiguous description of software and configuration
• 

May 2017: Collaboration with Sarven

• Beginning of May 2017, Sarven Capadisli visited us (in Technicum)
• Setup of collaboration (Ruben V, Sarven, Joachim, Miel)
• Goal: submit paper on vision and need for DI for ISWC 2017
• Side-goal: do it all in HTML (start of ScholarMarkdown)
• 

July 2017: Reject 1

• ISWC 2017 submission (In-Use) was rejected
• Reviewers clearly didn't read the paper properly
• Alternative: SemSci workshop at ISWC 2017 (accepted)
• Shortened version without Components.js
• https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/articles/describing-experiments/
• Next target: ISWC 2018 resources track for Components.js

May 2018: Reject 2

• More applied to real use case (Comunica)
• ISWC 2018 submission (Resources) was rejected
• Reviews were not negative, but also not positive. They didn't get the usefulness beyond Comunica.
• (Comunica did get accepted that same year in the resources track)

2018 - 2021: The period we gave up...

• Thinking about other venues (software engineering, ...)
• Did not find anything suitable

2021: Let's try a journal

• Advantages of journal: multiple review rounds
• By then we had more concrete proof of usage for Components.js
• Target: Semantic Web Journal as systems paper

2021: Let's try a journal

• Advantages of journal: multiple review rounds
• By then we had more concrete proof of usage for Components.js
• Target: Semantic Web Journal as systems paper

October 2021: First review round

• Minor revision: reviews were very positive!

January 2022: Second review round

• Accept: no further comments

Lessons learned

• Getting things published can take a long time

  Don't get demotivated by repeated rejections

• Conferences are lotteries

  Multiple review rounds of journals are easier

• Resource/system articles need proof of usage

  One usage is insufficient