Nanopublication and structured journalism

[David Caswell]

‘Nanopublication’ is a movement and a technical approach that began within scientific information management circles in 2009, focused on addressing the ‘too-much-text’ issue in scientific disciplines. The challenge it addresses is the increasing impossibility of scientists ‘keeping up’ with the literature in their fields, and the solution it proposes is to break down the information content of text papers into structured ‘nano-scale’ semantic units of published scientific activity, thereby creating new information artifacts that are computable, and which supplement text papers/articles. This is strikingly similar to structured journalism, and seeing the same basic problem and proposed solution articulated in a separate field, coming from separate roots, is very illuminating.

The nanopublication community is centered around a website at nanopub.org, and the largest implemented example seems to be OpenPHACTS, in the pharmaceutical domain.

A particularly useful introduction for journalists is a pre-publication paper by historians Patrick Golden​ and Ryan Shaw of UNC Chapel Hill, titled ‘Nanopublication beyond the Sciences’ and available here.

[Paul Rissen]

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing, David.

I like that it builds upon RDF & triples, but gives it focus on a particular use case. A lot of this stuff is more 'best practice' rather than only possible through their ontology, but there's no harm in them providing one. The 'nano' also speaks to a kind of 'minimum viable publication' which could appeal to people who like agile product development.

Would love to see this adapted to more popular appeal areas of data - sport, for instance.

[David Caswell]

I agree that its the concept/practice that is most important and validating, rather than just the particular ontology - although thats powerful too. I'm still working my way through the literature, and I'm hoping that it might be possible to publish my structured events as nanopublications.

[Ben Garside]

Ooo, cool.
Are there similar efforts in the legal world?
As a former law graduate, I recall reading elegantly-worded verdicts by judges prone to waffle, certainly too-much-text there.

Ben.

[David Caswell]

Yes there are! Check out 'computable contracts'. Much of the work has been done by a guy named Harry Surden at the University of Colorado Law School, and there's also a lab at Stanford working on this. Here's Surden's 'Constitutional Explorer'  http://www.harrysurden.com/projects/visual/USCode_D3/constitution/US_Constitution_Tree.html

There is no greater indication of 'An Idea Whose Time Has Come' than seeing the same basic concept pop up again and again in widely different fields. :-)