Broadening the Scope of Nanopublications

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we present an approach for extending the existing concept of nanopublications -tiny entities of scientific results in RDF representation -to broaden their application range. The proposed extension uses English sentences to represent informal and underspecified scientific claims. These sentences follow a syntactic and semantic scheme that we call AIDA (Atomic, Independent, Declarative, Absolute), which provides a uniform and succinct representation of scientific assertions. Such AIDA nanopublications are compatible with the existing nanopublication concept and enjoy most of its advantages such as information sharing, interlinking of scientific findings, and detailed attribution, while being more flexible and applicable to a much wider range of scientific results. We show that users are able to create AIDA sentences for given scientific results quickly and at high quality, and that it is feasible to automatically extract and interlink AIDA nanopublications from existing unstructured data sources. To demonstrate our approach, a web-based interface is introduced, which also exemplifies the use of nanopublications for non-scientific content, including meta-nanopublications that describe other nanopublications.

Period Assertion as Nanopublication

“…Kuhn et al [8] observe that even knowledge that cannot be completely formally represented can benefit from the nanopublication approach, including vague or uncertain findings in science. We agree, but we have taken this approach-publishing individual assertions from already published works along with their provenance-in a project that deals with pieces of information that are neither testable nor falsifiable.…”

“…Kuhn et al [8] are concerned that requiring formal representation for all scientific data published as nanopublications "seems to be unrealistic in many cases and might restrict the range of practical application considerably." We have found the same to be true with our dataset, and argue that the form and scope of nanopublication assertions should ultimately be determined by the practical needs of the researchers who use them.…”

Nanopublication beyond the sciences: the PeriodO period gazetteer

“…There are plenty of equivalents in history and the humanities to the databases of curated factual statements that exists in the sciences: prosopographical databases (Bradley & Short, 2005), digital historical gazetteers (Elliott & Gillies, 2011), not to mention the catalogs and indexes of bibliographical data that make humanities scholarship possible (Buckland, 2006). Some of these facts may be vague or uncertain, but as Kuhn et al (2013) observe, even knowledge that cannot be completely formally represented, including vague or uncertain scientific findings, can benefit from the nanopublication approach. We agree but would go further to say that nanopublication is useful even for information that is neither testable nor falsifiable, exemplified by Mink's synoptic judgments.…”

“…It is not necessary that these segmentations be falsifiable to achieve this goal; they only need to be comparable. Kuhn et al (2013) expressed concern that requiring formal representation for all scientific data published as nanopublications "seems to be unrealistic in many cases and might restrict the range of practical application considerably." Similarly, requiring assertions to be unambiguous and falsifiable would unnecessarily restrict the practical application of nanopublication.…”

Making Digital Artifacts on the Web Verifiable and Reliable

“…To test our approach and to evaluate its implementations, we first took a collection of 156,026 nanopublications in TriG format that we had produced in previous work [22]. We transformed these nanopublications into the formats N-Quads and TriX using existing off-theshelf converters.…”