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| Title | From Scientific Communication to Public Knowledge: The Scientific Article Web Published as a Knowledge Base |
| Kind of contribution | Single paper |
| Abstract | FROM SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION TO PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE: THE SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE WEB PUBLISHED AS A KNOWLEDGE BASE Carlos H. Marcondes Information Science Department, Information Science Post-graduate Program, Universidade Federal Fluminense R. Lara Vilela, 126 – 24210-590, Niterói – RJ, Brazil marcon@vm.uff.br Paper submitted to ElPub 2005 ABSTRACT 1.Problem. Linking Electronic publishing to Web ontologies should be a cognitive tool of which its impacts and possibilities are far from being evaluated. This paper discusses the potential of electronic publishing of scientific articles not only as text, but also as a machine readable knowledge base for scientific communication. The scientific communication process, a slow social one, has been the traditional mechanism in which new knowledge is incorporated to the body of Science. The potential of new information technology has been applied to modern bibliographic information systems to improve scientific communication, which provides fast notification and immediate access to full-text scientific documents. Despite these advances, the scientific communication process depends largely on text producing, reading and interpretation, and the citation of scientific articles by researchers. Today, except for some pioneer initiatives, the majority of the Web-published scientific journals are strongly based on the paper print publishing model. 2. Objectives. The objective of this research is to investigate the potential of the Web published scientific articles, conceived not only as text, but also as a machine readable knowledge base, explicitly and formally related to a Web-based public ontology, that represents the assented knowledge of a specific domain. The goal is to enhance Web electronic publishing to embody new facilities provided by the Web environment in the Semantic Web initiative context. There will be presented a framework of a system that, along with addressing text producing and publishing, will also capture the structural parts of a scientific article, such as the statement of the problem, the hypothesis, the methodology and the conclusions. Then this structure will be represented in a machine-readable format, and linked to the concepts expressed therein to a public Web ontology representing the assented knowledge of a scientific area. 3. Methodology. The article develops a prospective survey to identify similar proposals and innovative experiences in electronic publishing of scientific articles, authoring tools to assign comments to scientific articles, citation analysis and the reasons for citation. Scientific methodology is also reviewed looking for structural characteristics of the scientific method and scientific argumentation. It also reviews different experiences in developing Markup Language to some specific areas of knowledge, such as Chemical Markup Language, Mathematics Markup Language, Biology Markup Language. 4. Conclusions. A model of an electronic publishing process is outlined. This permits the electronic publishing of not only scientific articles as text, but it also enables an author to formalize the “deep structure” of a scientific article. This consists of assumptions, hypothesis, methodology, citations, datasets used, conclusions and contributions; all of which to publish as a knowledge base, as an ontology. XML is suggested as the mechanism to represent the structural characteristics of all these components of a Scientific article, thus outlining a Sm-ML, a Scientific methodology Markup Language. A Sm-ML should use the name-space facilities of XML to incorporate different name-spaces, a generic name-space concerning Scientific methodology and specific name-spaces for different knowledge areas. Concepts expressed in the different parts of a Scientific article should also be linked to public Web ontologies thus enabling the establishment of a formal relationship between the Scientific article specific ontology to ontologies like the UMLS – the Unified Medical Language System (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheet/umls.html). The citations of an article should also be linked to the cited Web published scientific articles as qualified citations, in which the reasons to cite and the relationship between this specific scientific article and its citations are made explicit. The proposed model of electronic publishing can enhance the scientific communication process, permitting semantic retrieval, critical inquiring, semantic citation, comparison, coherence verification and validating a scientific article through Web public ontologies which express the assented knowledge of a scientific area. The model was also conceived as the base for developing enhanced authoring and retrieval tools. Key-words: electronic publishing; scientific communication; scientific methodology; Semantic Web; XML; medical web ontologies; authoring tools; e-science |
Author 1
| Last name | Marcondes |
| First name | Carlos |
| Organization | Universidade Federal Fluminense |
| Department | Information Science |
| marcon@vm.uff.br |
