Tag: e-science

Future of Research Communication

Anna De Liddo and I spent an intensive 4 days in Germany last week working with leading figures to envisage the future of research communication.

Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics is a premier venue for hosting invitational informatics workshops. “FORC: The Future of Research Communication” was a Perspectives Workshop, bringing together leading people from academia, libraries and publishing.

Together with slides from various talks, the joint outcome will be a white paper designed to catalyse action to open up scholarly publishing and catalyse new collaborations around the socio-technical infrastructure needed to evolve a system which is increasingly not fit for purpose for the tackling the complex, urgent challenges of today (to borrow Doug Engelbart’s phrase, from 1962).

The future technical infrastructure will bring the “consumers” and peers closer to researchers as people, and the materials of their research (data, models, workflows, arguments, etc), using the wealth of channels and media now available.

Net-Centric Scholarly Discourse?

Background

KMi’s pioneering work since the late 1990s into social, semantic scholarly publishing and internet argumentation has established it as one of the leaders in the field (e.g. the Journal of Interactive Media in Education; the EPSRC Scholarly Ontologies Project; the Hewlett Foundation Cohere Project).

Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics:

(German: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH) is the world’s premier venue for informatics. World-class scientists, promising young researchers, and practioners come together to exchange their knowledge and to discuss their research findings. The Center promotes fundamental and applied research, continuing and advanced academic education, and the transfer of knowledge between those involved in the research side and application side of informatics. The key instruments for promoting research are the Dagstuhl Seminars and the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops, which bring together internationally renowned leading scientists for the purpose of exploring a cutting-edge informatics topic. The friendly and open climate at the conference center promotes a culture of communication and exchange among the seminar participants.

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Scientific Discourse on the Semantic Web: A Survey

Emerging from extremely productive interactions with members of the emerging Hyp-ER community, including most recently, Ágnes Sándor’s visiting fellowship, this survey article on modelling scientific discourse has been posted for open peer review by the Semantic Web Journal:

Scientific Discourse on the Semantic Web:
A Survey of Models and Enabling Technologies

Simon Buckingham Shum
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK

Tim Clark
Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard University, USA

Anita de Waard
Advanced Technology Group, Elsevier & Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University, NL

Tudor Groza & Siegfried Handschuh
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, IE

Ágnes Sándor
Parsing & Semantics Group, Xerox Research Centre Europe, FR

Abstract

The desired outcome of all scientific endeavour is to advance the body of accumulated knowledge in a materially verifiable way.  This knowledge is communicated through the research literature, which presents scientific claims and their justifications through forms of discourse, expressed in document genres legitimated by a given research community. The study of the rhetorical and argumentative characteristics of such discourse has long-standing traditions, the results of which also provide insights into how scientific publishing, search and debate might take new forms on the social-semantic web. This article surveys, for a general readership, the growing body of work that models scientific discourse for social-semantic web applications, and offers a framework highlighting key features to help compare the various models. Secondly, we present examples of tools based on discourse models, which facilitate semantic navigation, structured debate, human and machine annotation of scientific texts, and literature analysis/alerting services. Finally, we identify some of the open research challenges confronting the field, and summarise the ways in which they are being tackled. [PDF]