Welcome to the semantically annotated Publication database using AjaX (PAX).

What is PAX?

PAX is a Web application for managing scientific publications on an institute's, research group's, and researcher's homepage. It makes use of Ajax for providing a user friendly interface, supporting drag and drop as well as dynamic changes of the Web pages. PAX handles Publications, Projects, Publishers, Partners/Funding Organizations, Research Groups, Employees, Authors/Editors. As an underlying framework symfony was used. PAX is an open source project - do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in the source code.

Import formats supported:

BibTeX

Export formats supported:

BibTeX

RDF and RDFa according to the SWRC-unizh ontology, which is an extension of the SWRC ontology.

CSV

Semantic Data

Each page is annotated with RDF and RDFa metadata. Furthermore a file with the complete OWL annotations is provided.

Download RDF for the entire database

Download BibTeX for the entire database

Who developed PAX?

PAX was developed as a diploma thesis at the Departments of Informatics at the University of Zurich. The thesis was advised by Dr. Gerald Reif and implemented by Michael Hermann.

Download the diploma thesis

History & 2026 revival

PAX was put into operation around 2006 and ran at the Department of Informatics until at least 2012, managing publications for several research groups (including the DDIS group led by Prof. Abraham Bernstein). It was clearly developed further during those years: the surviving production data contains publication types and fields this code base never had, and an archived departmental page from 2011 lists publication IDs well beyond the range preserved here.

What you see here is built on the original source code, now roughly 20 years old — not on the later state the system reached in production. Those later changes are lost; only their traces in the data remain.

The code lay untouched for about two decades. In 2026 it was rediscovered, ported from PHP 5 to PHP 8, and put through a full security review before being republished here.

Where the data comes from

The publications shown are not demo records. They were restored from the real production exports of 2010 — a BibTeX file and an RDF dump of the live database — and comprise the publication record of the department as it stood then. The research projects were recovered from a single archived snapshot of the project page taken in February 2009, the only copy that appears to have survived.

The restoration is deliberately conservative: where a source gave only an internal reference and no name, no data was invented. Roughly one in eleven entries still carries no author, and one project referenced by publications could not be recovered at all. A further 26 entries are conference proceedings, which correctly list editors rather than authors.

Where the 2010 sources gave no names, the gap was partly closed against the current departmental publication database, which still holds records inherited from PAX. Those additions are marked as such in the data. Nothing here is connected to any current institutional record, and the database is not maintained — it exists as a look back at an early-career project.

This revived instance is operated by Michael Hermann (michael@sinnraumhorizont.ch). It has no affiliation with the University of Zurich and is not maintained by the Department of Informatics.