The Semantic Institution: An Agenda for Publishing Authoritative Scholarly Facts. Leslie Carr

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1 The Semantic Institution: An Agenda for Publishing Authoritative Scholarly Facts Leslie Carr

2 What s the Web For? To share information 1. Ad hoc home pages 2. Structured portals 3. Semantic portals 4. Repositories 5. Semantic repositories To integrate information i.e. coherent and cross-domain views and analyses Say no to mining and mashing!

3 What s the Semantic Web? To share information between computers Everything is written in triples instead of pages Author Tim Berners-Lee

4 What s the Semantic Web? To share information between computers Everything is written in triples instead of pages subject Author predicate Tim Berners-Lee object

5 What s the Semantic Web? To share information between computers Everything is written in triples instead of pages subject Author predicate object Name Tim Berners-Lee tbl@w3c.org

6 What s the Semantic Web? To share information between computers Everything is written in triples instead of pages subject Every subject, or object can have its own URI Name Author predicate object And every predicate is defined in an ontology Tim Berners-Lee tbl@w3c.org

7 Personal academic web pages ad hoc and 2 years out of date (on average!)

8 Portal pages: draw together all official info from many databases

9 Semantic web portal pages: equivalent information published as RDF. Policy establishes ontology, individuals and persistent URIs.

10 Repository pages: metadata and data deposited by user on a regular basis (backed by policy) for Open Access.

11 A Word about OA, Repositories and Semantic Web

12 A Word about OA, Repositories and Semantic Web Open Access is ostensibly about dissemination of research outputs Repositories deliver Open Access by capturing research outputs from individual researchers also research data, teaching outputs, scholarly collections and other researchergenerated knowledge Repositories collect metadata using well-defined schema, along with the primary data Modern scholarly communications is much more than documents It s citation analysis, research fronts, impact analysis In short, it s facts Who wrote what x what cited what x who funded what

13 A Word about OA, Repositories and Semantic Web So, Open Access / Scholarly Communications is ideal for delivering a Semantic Web agenda partly because it s a useful source of data mainly because it demands a change of working practice individuals become knowledge publishers in a scalable fashion, assisted by technology

14 Semantic repository pages: equivalent information published as RDF.

15 Semantic repository pages: adhere to discipline of referring to URIs established by external authorities, ie authors aren t strings, they are individuals who can be tabulated.

16 RDF temptations A Repository holds information about publications, authors, projects, journals, research groups etc It is tempting to export all that information as RDF It is wiser to publish only the information that the repository is authoritative on Force agents to look up the other information from authoritative services Always refer to other (official) URIs/individuals where possible Look beyond the boundaries of the information system Co-operate with the other systems & policies Does this include journal names?

17 The Semantic Institution The Repository is a single player in an institution s knowledge publishing activities Artefacts Agents Activities Different domains of authority over different kinds of information Should be an integrated policy for information publishing Who assigns ids to what? Who makes statements about what? Repository Personnel Project Administration Course Managemen

18 The Semantic Nation Semantic Individuals researchers who curate their own intellectual capital using repositories combine to make Semantic Institutions organisations that defines policies on naming, identification, information sharing and preservation see recent ECS initiative which co-operate to form a Semantic Nation loose co-operation via SPARQL endpoints allow agents to query and combine all the information exported by every institution

19 Current Practice Harvesting + Data mining Even with semi-structured data (repositories) OAI-PMH + Dublin Core / METS Everything is a mashup Citation and analysis services harvest material from data providers, but have to interpret metadata contents and data

20 Semantic Mashups Mashups are impressive only because they are difficult AKT award-winning CS AKTivespace involved ACM classification, EPSRC database, mining entire national CS home pages, RAE database, publication list & making proto Google Map

21 Semantic Mashups or a Semantic Community Mashing is a tacit admission that material had to be deconstructed because it wasn t published in a suitably useful form. Don t do things difficult, do things disciplined. Institutions provide an opportunity to manage scale - halfway between individual and global Decentralised doesn t mean that there are no domains of authority.

22 Concluding Comments Need effective user interface for collecting metadata based on SW authorities i.e. how to choose the right URIs in a form How to choose between or reconcile competing authorities? e.g. DBLP vs ECS vs LOC vs ACM for authors Maintaining internal consistency and flexibility within an institution