1.
Towards Digitizing Scholarly
Communication
Sören Auer
University of Bonn & Fraunhofer IAIS

2.
Publishing 6600 BCE
Jiahu symbols 16 distinct
markings on prehistoric artifacts
found in Jiahu, a neolithic
Peiligang culture site found in
Henan, China

3.
Publishing
2000 BCE
Cursive hieroglyphs
from the Papyrus of
Ani (1250 BCE)

4.
Publishing
380 BCE
Papirus
Oxyrhynchus,
with fragment
of Plato's
Republic

5.
12th century
publishing
Codex Gigas (largest extant
medieval manuscript) was
created in the Benedictine
monastery of Podlažice in
Bohemia (now Czech
Republic).

6.
Scientific publishing
in the 17th century
One of the earliest research
journals: Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal
Society
© CC BY Henry Oldenburg

7.
Scientific
publishing today
Mainly based on PDF
• Is only partially machine-
readable
• Does not preserve structure
• Does not allow embedding of
semantics
• Does not facilitate
interactivity/dynamicity/
repurposing
• …

8.
Has it changed much?
In terms of distribution: YES
• Almost zero cost of copying and distribution
• (whole history of publishing is mainly a history of
the reduction of marginal costs of publishing)
In terms of method/representation: NO
• Articles are fixed sucessions of characters and
words
• static in terms of presentation, content, granularity

9.
Researchers spend (most of)
their time on:
• Encoding their
findings in articles
• Decoding other
reserchers findings
from articles
• Finding related
work
• Getting an
overview over the
state-of-the-art
We need to develop means to make scholarly communication
more efficient and effective.

10.
New possibilities in a
Digital World
• Machine-readability
• Semantic representation
• Dynamic content, interactive examples
• Integration of multimedia content
• Rich interlinking with context (related work, calls,
reviews, comments/ discussions)
• Integration of rich metadata (provenance,
licensing)
• Interactive collaboration
• …

11.
Machine-readability
• In PDFs the structure of the documents is lost
• Headings, paragraphs, tables, references etc. are
not recognizable anymore
• Semantics can only be added as metadata on a per
document level

12.
Semantic Representation
In addition to 5-star data (http://5stardata.info) we need 5-star
documents:
• Machine-readable
• Semantics-aware
• Interlinked
David Shotton: The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles, D-Lib Magazine
(2012), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january12/shotton/01shotton.html

13.
limes-paper describes appr1 .
appr1 a approach .
appr1 for Link_Discovery
appr1 hasProp looseless .
...
limes-paper describes impl1 .
impl1 a implementation
impl1 implements appr1 .
impl1 language Java .
...
limes-paper describes eval1 .
eval1 a evaluation .
eval1 evaluates impl1 .
eval1 uses Dbpedia .
...
Internal: Semantic Description of Scientific
Content
Facilitates querying for all link discovery approaches
having certain properties or implementations thereof in
a certain language using a certain dataset.

14.
External: Rich Interlinking with Related Work,
Calls, Reviews, Discussions, …

15.
Three approaches for digitizing
scholarly communication
Linked Research – enabling semantic
authoring, publishing, discovery
SlideWiki – courseware authoring and
translation
OpenResearch – Collaborative Management
of Scholarly Communication Metadata

16.
Dokie.li: clientside editor for
decentralised article publishing,
annotations and social interactions
http://Dokie.li
Sarven Capadisli

17.
A holistic view on scientific publishing

18.
Sparklines –
Adding small interactive inline charts

19.
Linked Research & dokie.li Features
• Documents are human and machine-
friendly.
• Using the plain old semantic HTML marking
process, with further semantic annotations
using microformats and RDF.
• All kinds of interactive content can be
embedded into the HTML5 documents e.g.
Javascript apps, code, videos, audio,
interactive visualizations
• Different views e.g., ACM, LNCS, W3C-ED,
Slideshow, Native
• Builds on Linked Data Platform, Solid and
Linked Data Notifications to realize truly
decentralized authoring & publishing
workflows

20.
Interlinking a research article, call for
contributions and workshops, and proceedings
@prefix sioc: <http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#> .
@prefix schema: <https://schema.org/> .
@prefix bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/> .
<http://semstats.org/2013/>
sioc:reply_of <http://iswc2013.semanticweb.org/content/call-workshops.html> ;
schema:hasPart <http://semstats.org/2013/call-for-papers> .
<http://csarven.ca/linked-statistical-data-analysis>
sioc:reply_of <http://semstats.org/2013/call-for-papers> ;
bibo:citedBy <http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1549/> .
<http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1549/>
schema:hasPart <http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1549/#article-06> .
<http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1549/#article-06>
bibo:uri <http://csarven.ca/linked-statistical-data-analysis> .

21.
Comparison of scientific authoring and
publishing approaches
ACaA Access control and attribution
AtA Adaptation to audiences
CaF Commentary and feedback
DAaP Decentralised authoring and publishing
DI Data integration
DVaM Different views and media
EI Entity identifiers
FaI Feedback and interactions
HaMR Human and machine-readability
IAaPW Integrated authoring and publication workflow
IC Interactive content
IM Impact metrics
IoS Integration of semantics
M Multimedia
PaA Provenance and accountability
PaP Persistence and preservation
SaSI Sharing and social interactions

22.
OpenResearch – a Semantic Wiki for Scientific
Event Metadata (RIS for Events)
We need Research Information Systems not only for organizations but
also for communities or specific types of content
Events are a crucial element of scholarly communication
Information about events is difficult to obtain:
• Quality (e.g. acceptance rate, PC members)
• Logistics (locations, fees)
• Dates (submission, registration etc.)
• Co-located events
• …
CC BY 3.0 Wiki4des at English Wikipedia

23.
Structured
event meta
data
Semantic
(typed) links
inside call text

24.
Interactive Queries
(can be also created by users)

25.
OpenResearch.org Architecture

26.
SlideWiki – A collaborative OpenCourseWare
Authoring Platform
• Collaborative creation and maintenance of high-quality,
multilingual OpenCourseWare is still a major challenge
• SlideWiki is a platform for OpenCourseWare creation
employing crowdsourcing, full versioning, WYSIWIG

27.
Facilitates translations
to many languages
Helps to keep track of authors,
translators and sources

28.
SlideWiki: Self-assessment questions
… can be attached
to every single slide

29.
Learners can test their knowledge
… an be pointed exactly to
the content they need to
revisit

30.
How is SlideWiki different?
SlideWiki differs from other online tools for presentations,
such as Google Docs Presentations, Prezi, SlideShare due to its
focus on:
• E-learning - you can add questions to slides and thus
compose comprehensive self-assessment tests for learners
• Collaboration - SlideWiki aims at empowering whole
communities to create presentations collaboratively
• Translation - with SlideWiki content can be easily translated
in more than 50 languages

31.
Semantic Web Layer Cake 2001
http://www.w3.org/2001/10/03-sww-1/slide7-0.html
• Monolithic based on XML
• Focus on heavyweight Semantic
(Ontologies, Logic, Reasoning)

32.
© Fraunhofer
The Semantic Web Layer Cake 2015 –
Bridging between Big & Smart Data
Unicode URIs
XML JSON CSV RDB HTML
RDF
RDF/XML JSON-LD CSV2RDF R2RML RDFa
RDF Data
Shapes
RDF-Schema
Vocabularies
OntologiesSKOS Thesauri
LogicSWRL Rules
SPARQL
(Accesscontrol),Signatur,
Encryption(HTTPS/CERT/DANE),
• Lingua Franca of Data
integration with many
technology interfaces (XML,
HTML, JSON, CSV, RDB,…)
• Focus on lightweight
vocabularies, rules,
thesauri etc.
• Less “invasive”

33.
Towards an Ecosystem of Open Scholarly
Communication Infrastructure
Authoring
environments
•Crowd-sourcing,
versioning, social
networking
5-Star publishing
of data,
documents,
courseware and
artefacts
•Decentralized,
open, interlinked
Research
information
systems
•organization,
community, region,
communication-
type centered
We need to invest more into
techniques tailored for
digital knowledge exchange
instead of techniques
mimicking work-arounds of
the past.
From
document-centricity to
knowledge-centricity

34.
Thanks for your attention
Sören Auer
http://eis.iai.uni-bonn.de/SoerenAuer.html
auer@cs.uni-bonn.de
http://OpenResearch.org
http://SlideWiki.org
https://dokie.li
Sarven Capadisli
http://csarven.ca
Christoph Lange
https://langec.wordpress.com