Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The semantic web
The web as we know it today pretty much follows a traditional print
model, i.e. journals are broken down into volumes, issues and articles,
and books into chapters. It is very much a web of documents existing
within distinct data silos, with limited connections between documents.
This makes it harder to find relevant, trustworthy material quickly and
easily as more and more information becomes available via the web.
In contrast, the semantic web offers an array of opportunities to
enhance the content-discovery and research process within scholarly
publishing. The semantic web is an interconnected, integrated web of
data allowing researchers to follow lines of research without having to
resort to wading through pages and pages of search results, which may
or may not have relevance to their research.
If we take citations as a conceptual example, we know that
documents B and C cite document A, but within the world of the
semantic web additional information can be stored about the
relationships between citations, e.g. that document B supports
document A but document C refutes A. This concept can be taken a
step further by the addition of richer relationship layers between data,
which could include:
links to other papers written by the cited author(s), allowing users
easily to navigate to other papers of interest
concepts extracted from papers (ontologies, taxonomies and
controlled vocabularies play an important part here), allowing
users to drill down to concepts of interest and quickly see a
definition of a key term, papers, chapters and raw datasets
relevant to that concept, and so on
relevant external datasets pulled in from trusted external
resources, allowing users to review and manipulate raw research
data and potentially to do further research in the field as a result -
mash-ups or 'lively data' (Shotton, 2009; Shotton et al., 2009) are
a good example of this
links to research projects currently under way, author blogs, news
items, etc.
The semantic web thereby builds an ever-expanding web of
interconnecting data to support:
