2020/06/11 by Cristina-Iulia Bucur, Tobias Kuhn, Bucur, Cristina-Iulia +3
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Semantic Web and Ontologies #Topic Modeling #cs.DL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.06348
arxiv created 2020/06/11 · openalex publication_date 2020/06/11 · arxiv updated 2020/06/12 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Scientific publishing is the means by which we communicate and share scientific knowledge, but this process currently often lacks transparency and machine-interpretable representations. Scientific articles are published in long coarse-grained text with complicated structures, and they are optimized for human readers and not for automated means of organization and access. Peer reviewing is the main method of quality assessment, but these peer reviews are nowadays rarely published and their own complicated structure and linking to the respective articles is not accessible. In order to address these problems and to better align scientific publishing with the principles of the Web and Linked Data, we propose here an approach to use nanopublications as a unifying model to represent in a semantic way the elements of publications, their assessments, as well as the involved processes, actors, and provenance in general. To evaluate our approach, we present a dataset of 627 nanopublications representing an interlinked network of the elements of articles (such as individual paragraphs) and their reviews (such as individual review comments). Focusing on the specific scenario of editors performing a meta-review, we introduce seven competency questions and show how they can be executed as SPARQL queries. We then present a prototype of a user interface for that scenario that shows different views on the set of review comments provided for a given manuscript, and we show in a user study that editors find the interface useful to answer their competency questions. In summary, we demonstrate that a unified and semantic publication model based on nanopublications can make scientific communication more effective and user-friendly.