SCILINK · Semiautomatic Methods for the Creation and Maintenance of Links between Scientific Resource Aggregations on the Web

The Web has revolutionized the way of publishing and distributing scientific results. If, however, we regard current publications on the Web, they still resemble the production process of traditional print publications and usually do not deliver the relevant or even necessary information for the described research context, such as the data sets required for reproducing experiments. The goal of the SciLink project is to reassess the traditional way of publishing scientific results on the Web. We believe that arranging publications as aggregations of Web resources and linking them with resources in a broader network of data-centric, Web-based information sources (e.g., DBpedia) will allow scientists to better share, reuse, and further enhance their scientific assets. The proposed research objectives will build on established standards, most importantly the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specification. The central contributions of the SciLink project are: (i) a semi-automatic link discovery framework for establishing links from publications to semantically related resources on the Web (e.g., DBpedia resources), (ii) the development of strategies and solutions for maintaining link integrity in an open information space, and (iii) novel Web-based aggregation authoring and presentation solutions. We expect that a variety of disciplines, which are currently adopting the OAI-ORE specification for their scientific publications, will make use of our proposed research results. Furthermore, with our approach we will also bridge the gap between the developments in the OAI-ORE and those in the Linked Data community. The results of SciLink will also have a direct impact on the European Union’s digital library flagship initiative Europeana, where the OAI-ORE concepts are applied for “building the Europeana Semantic Layer”.