Why Linked Data is Not Enough for Scientists

Abstract

Scientific data stands to represent a significant portion of the linked open data cloud and science itself stands to benefit from the data fusion capability that this will afford. However, simply publishing linked data into the cloud does not necessarily meet the requirements of reuse. Publishing has requirements of provenance, quality, credit, attribution, methods in order to provide the reproducibility that allows validation of results. In this paper we make the case for a scientific data publication model on top of linked data and introduce the notion of Research Objects as first class citizens for sharing and publishing.

Scientific Social Objects: The Social Objects and Multidimensional Network of the myExperiment Website

“…Through a series of discussions about the affordances of these social objects 1 we propose the following dimensions [8].…”

COWB: A cloud-based framework supporting collaborative knowledge management within biomedical communities

“…flexible virtual environments where the knowledge can be created, organized and shared by a community of distributed users that have common goals and interests. Additionally, questions are now beginning to come out from studies [11,12,13] about some limits of the semantic technologies in facing the requirement of different domains, including bioinformatics [14,15].…”

Exploring openness in data and science: What is “open,” to whom, when, and why?

“…Borgman (2015) identified four rationales for sharing research data: to reproduce research, to make public assets available to the public, to leverage investments in research, and to advance research and innovation. Very few studies on the actual benefits of opening research data exist (Beagrie & Houghton, 2014). Sabina Leonelli (2013) suggests that the allure of big and open data "lies precisely in the impossibility to predict and quantify their potential as evidence in advance.…”

“…These include Object Reuse and Exchange ( Van de Sompel et al, 2012), Resource Sync (Pepe, Mayernik, Borgman, & Van de Sompel, 2010), and Scholarly Research Objects (Bechhofer et al, 2010). Yet another model is "Linked Open Science" (Kauppinen & Espindola, 2011) that supports "executable papers" in which tools and data for reproducing analyses are embedded.…”