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

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.

History & 2026 revival

PAX was in productive use at the Department of Informatics from roughly 2007 to 2010, managing publications for several research groups (including the DDIS group led by Prof. Abraham Bernstein). In 2010 it was retired and replaced by a new, unrelated system called Merlin.

The code then lay untouched for about 16 years. In 2026 it was rediscovered, ported from its original PHP 5-era codebase to PHP 8, and put through a full security review before being republished here. This instance runs with historical test data only — it is not connected to any current institutional publication record — and exists as a nostalgic look back at an early-career project rather than an actively maintained database.