1) Current methods of publishing and sharing research results and data pose problems regarding verifiability, immutability, and permanence over time. 2) Nanopublications use cryptographic hashes to create "Trusty URIs" that make digital objects verifiable, immutable, and permanent by linking identifiers to content. 3) A decentralized network of nanopublication servers allows for open, real-time publishing and retrieval of nanopublications without a central authority through propagation across nodes.

1. Nanopublications and
Decentralized Publishing
Tobias Kuhn
http://www.tkuhn.org
@txkuhn
Department of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam
DANS Seminar on
Linked Data in Research and Cultural Heritage
Den Haag
1 May 2017

2. Problem:
Replication and Re-Use of Research Results
Exemplary Situation: Sue publishes a script that should allow
everybody to replicate her Linked Data based analysis:
# Download data:
wget http://collection.britishmuseum.org/dumps/
....BMCollection-2013-09-25.tar.gz
# Analyze data:
...
Problems:
• What if the resource becomes unavailable at this location?
• What if the third party silently changes the dataset?
• What if the web site gets hacked and the data manipulated?
• What if I am only interested in a small subset of the dataset?
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 2 / 20

3. Data Publishing, Archiving, and Re-Use
Published data should therefore be:
• Verifiable (Is this really the data I am looking for?)
• Immutable (Can I be sure that it hasn’t been modified?)
• Permanent (Will it be available in 1, 5, 20 years from now?)
• Reliable (Can it be efficiently retrieved whenever needed?)
• Granular (Can I refer to individual data entries?)
• Semantic (Can it be automatically interpreted?)
• Linked (Does it use established identifiers and ontologies?)
• Trustworthy (Can I trust the source?)
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 3 / 20

4. Nanopublications:
Provenance-Aware Linked Data Publishing
assertion
provenance
publication info
nanopublication
http://nanopub.org / @nanopub org
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 4 / 20

5. Nanopublication Example
:assertion {
:p occursIn: mesh:D004730 .
:p geneProductOf: hgnc:3763 .
}
:provenance {
:assertion prov:hadPrimarySource
pubmed:12891700 .
}
:pubinfo { :np
dct:created 2014-07-03 ;
pav:createdBy
orcid:0000-0001-6818-334X . }
complete version: https://goo.gl/f7iPKK
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 5 / 20

6. Identifiability Problem of URIs (Web Links)
http://collection.britishmuseum.org/dumps/
BMCollection-2013-09-25.tar.gz
?
Given a URI for a digital artifact, there is no reliable standard
procedure of checking whether a retrieved file really represents the
correct and original state of that artifact.
Solution: Identifiers that include (iterative) cryptographic hash
values (as applied, for example, by Git and Bitcoin)
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 6 / 20

7. Trusty URIs: Cryptographic Hash Values for
Verifiable and Immutable Web Identifiers
Basic idea: Use of cryptographic hash values together with URIs as
identifiers for digital artifacts such as nanopublications.
Example of a Trusty URI for RDF content:
.trighttp://example.org/r1. RA 5AbXdpz5DcaYXCh9l3eI9ruBosiL5XDU3rxBbBaUO70
Kuhn, Dumontier. Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data. ESWC 2014.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 7 / 20

8. Verifiable — Immutable — Permanent
Whether or not a given resource is the one a given trusty URI is
supposed to represent can be verified with perfect confidence.
http://trustyuri.net
Kuhn, Dumontier. Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data. ESWC 2014.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 8 / 20

9. Extended Range of Verifiability Through
Iterative Hashing
http://...RAcbjcRI...
http://...RAQozo2w...
http://...RABMq4Wc...
http://...RAcbjcRI...
http://...RAQozo2w...
http://.../resource23
http://.../resource23
...
http://...RAUx3Pqu...
http://.../resource55
http://...RABMq4Wc...
http://.../resource55
http://...RARz0AX-...
...
http://...RAUx3Pqu...
...
http://...RARz0AX...
...
range of
verifiability
Kuhn, Dumontier. Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data. ESWC 2014.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 9 / 20

10. Verifiable — Immutable — Permanent
Trusty URI artifacts are immutable, as any change in the content
also changes its URI, thereby making it a new artifact.
http://trustyuri.net
Kuhn, Dumontier. Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data. ESWC 2014.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 10 / 20

11. Verifiable — Immutable — Permanent
Trusty URI artifacts are permanent, as they can be retrieved from
the cache of third-party websites if otherwise no longer available.
http://trustyuri.net
Kuhn, Dumontier. Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data. ESWC 2014.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 11 / 20

12. Decentralized and Reliable Publishing with a
Nanopublication Server Network
Nanopublications
with Trusty URIs
Publication
Retrieval
Propagation /
Archiving
http://purl.org/nanopub/monitor
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 12 / 20

13. Decentralized — Open — Real-time
• No a central authority: Everybody can set up a server and join
the network
• No restrictions on publication: Everybody can upload
nanopublications
• No delay between submission and publication: Nanopublications
are made public immediately
• No updates: If a nanopublication is modified, that makes it a
new nanopublication (enforced by trusty URIs)
• No queries: Only simple identifier-based lookup
Kuhn et al. Publishing without Publishers: a Decentralized Approach to Dissemination, Retrieval, and Archiving of
Data. ISWC 2015.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 13 / 20

14. Defining Datasets with Nanopublication Indexes
(which are themselves Nanopublications)
appends
has sub-index
has
element
(a) (b)
(c) (f)
(d) (e)
Kuhn et al. Publishing without Publishers: a Decentralized Approach to Dissemination, Retrieval, and Archiving of
Data. ISWC 2015.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 14 / 20

15. Existing Nanopublication Datasets
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 15 / 20

16. Using Nanopublication Datasets
Once published in the network, researchers can fetch and reuse the
data in a reliable and prefectly reproducible manner:
# Download data:
np get -c RAR5dwELYLKGSfrOclnWhjOj-2nGZN 8BW1JjxwFZINHw
# Analyze data:
...
Existing data can be recombined in new indexes; and researchers can
unambiguously refer to the used datasets for new results:
this: prov:wasDerivedFrom nps:RAR5dwELYLKGSfrOclnWhjOj-2nGZN 8BW1Jjx
Kuhn et al. Publishing without Publishers: a Decentralized Approach to Dissemination, Retrieval, and Archiving of
Data. arXiv:1411.2749.
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 16 / 20

17. Could these techniques and infrastructures allow us to
make a step forward in terms of automation in science?
S C I E N C E B O T S
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 17 / 20

18. S C I E N C E B O T S
Science bots could cover a wide variety of applications, for example:
nanopub
-lications
PubMed
abstracts
nanopub
-lications
sensor
data
nanopub
-lications
nanopub
-lications
text mining bot
inference bot
sensor bot
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 18 / 20

19. Panel Questions
• Should we treat software and data like papers when it comes to
giving credit and measuring impact, or do we need something
else than citations?
• Can and should we automate to a certain extent scientific
analyses and their replications?
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 19 / 20

20. Thank you for your attention!
Questions?
Further information:
• My personal website: http://www.tkuhn.org
• Trusty URIs: http://trustyuri.net
• Nanopublications: http://nanopub.org
Tobias Kuhn, VU University Amsterdam Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing 20 / 20