Making sense of Linked Research

[Sarven Capadisli]

http://csarven.ca/sense-of-lsd-analysis

Okay, so, that's boring supposedly science-magic stuff.

Go ahead and dereference the URI to RDF.

Once again, IMHO, what's cooler is that it is a human and
machine-friendly document. This is where Linked Research (aka: Linked
Science, Semantic Publishing etc.) comes in:

The document is in XHTML+RDFa and has screen and print stylesheets. The
screen styles are what you would normally see in your Web browser. The
print style is based on the LNCS template (you know, the one that some
SW/LD research events force you to use when you submit your SW/LD
bling-bling in PDF) - so, yes, you can output to PDF. Go ahead and copy
the stylesheets and make it better:
http://github.com/csarven/linked-research

See how some of the following vocabularies/ontologies are put to use:

* Semantic Publishing and Referencing: http://purl.org/spar
* Provenance Ontology: http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o
* Open Provenance Model for Workflows: http://www.opmw.org/ontology
* DC Terms: http://purl.org/dc/terms

There is much room for improvement. No doubt.

The SW/LD research community produces incredible work. Yet, what super
sucks is that the community can not get its act together to eat its own
dogfood. The community is at best stuck on *1-star*
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData . Even workshops that are
about "Linked Science" or "Semantic Publishing" etc. are going in
circles. Mind-boggling.

The community is socially challenged to improve the state of SW
research. It has a hard time learning from its own discoveries because
it is stuck on desktop native document formats e.g., PDF, as opposed to
taking it to the Web in its truest sense. It "hacks" around to attach or
gather metadata about the research document instead of focusing on the
valuable things inside those documents, which goes far beyond titles,
abstracts, subjects, references.. The community simply can not
intelligently mine previously published, *publicly funded* research.
Reinvents. The community has to jump through hoops and fire to access a
PDF document that resides in some publishers website. Whoever is in
charge of the domain/path, they call the shots!


Here is the challenge and a call to all SW/LD researchers. If you think
your work is interesting enough, even slightly, willing to put your neck
out, and want to make an honest contribution towards what we are all
*essentially* working on, please give this a try:

1. Create and publish your goods: "Any resource of significance should
be given a URI. " -
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html#Universality2 . That goes
beyond the "document" that you submit your work to conferences. It is
from hypotheses, experiments, results, workflows, everything in those
documents that deserve to be known and accessible. It is so that the
next researcher can *honestly* take from where you left off or compare
their work with yours. Don't worry, there is plenty of information that
needs to be text-mined, but we can certainly improve the situation on
what can be structured and eventually queried for. At least we have a
way to look up those atomic resources or discover them.

2. Publish your work on your personal site, university, work, wherever.
The point is that you should have control over it.

3. Link to other people's goods.

4. Have an open comment system policy. Get reviews, feedback, questions
all in there that the community can engage in to improve the research
further. It will feed itself.


That's it. I'm done.

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i