Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
further research and new discoveries
cross-disciplinary collaboration resulting in richer applications
increased visibility of relevant data
ability for untrained researchers to find data quickly
easier research collaboration
a more interactive user experience.
It may well be that the semantic web has been over-hyped, but there is
little doubt that it is beginning to gain momentum and has the
potential to revolutionize the discovery process. Within the scholarly
publishing space, the early adopters are leading the way with more
widespread take-up expected to follow. More generally, the Obama
administration has recently announced support for semantic-web
technologies for datasets produced by the US government, the Google
Rich Snippets project shows Google dipping its toes in the water of
semantic-web technologies, and Elsevier's Grand Challenge offers
researchers financial incentives to prototype tools dealing with the ever-
increasing amount of online life-sciences information.
Alerting services
Publishers do a great deal to aid discovery. Search engine optimization
(SEO) is big business; abstracting and indexing services have historically
been important, but now their relevance and expense are being called
into question. Other advances have already changed the way that
academics work: e-mail alerts and RSS feeds of new material and tables
of contents can be highly tailored across a number of journals and other
services; these are delivered automatically to provide academics with
what is, in effect, a personal journal. In addition, Web 2.0 technologies
are facilitating the sharing of information between users.
Metadata and social bookmarking
Social bookmarking and social citation tools and services like del.icio.us
(now Delicious),
2
CiteULike,
3
,Connotea
4
and Diigo
5
are playing an
increasingly important role in discovery. They allow users to tag content
and share links and citations, adding metadata and creating
'folksonomies' - user-generated taxonomies - as they go. Implementing
