Making sense of Linked Research

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