Genuine Semantic Publishing

Tracking #: 519-1499

	Name	ORCID
	Tobias Kuhn	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-0234
	Michel Dumontier	https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4727-9435

Authors:

Submission Type:

Position Paper

Abstract:

Various approaches and systems have been presented in the context of scholarly communication for what has been called semantic publishing. Closer inspection, however, reveals that these approaches are mostly not about publishing semantic representations, as the name seems to suggest. Rather, most approaches take the processes and outcomes of the current narrative-based publishing system for granted and only work with the already published papers. This includes semantic annotations, semantic interlinking, semantic integration, and semantic discovery, but with the semantics coming into play only after the publication of the original article. While these are interesting and important approaches, they fall short of providing a vision to transcend the current publishing paradigm. We argue for taking the term semantic publishing literally and work towards a vision of genuine semantic publishing, where computational tools and algorithms can help us with dealing with the wealth of human knowledge by letting researchers capture their research results with formal semantics from the start, as integral components of their publications. We argue that these semantic components should furthermore cover at least the main results, that they should originate from the authors themselves, and that they should be fine-grained and light-weight for optimized re-usability and minimized publication overhead. This paper is in fact not just advocating our concept, but is itself a genuine semantic publication, thereby demonstrating and illustrating our points.

Manuscript:

ds-paper-519.zip

Supplementary Files (optional):

ds-supplementary-519-793.zip

Previous Version:

Genuine Semantic Publishing

Data repository URLs:

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5422726

RDF representations of manuscript content: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/data-science-hub/data/master/rdf/ds-rdf-519.trig

Date of Submission:

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Nanopublication URLs:

RESPONSE TO REVIEWERS

We would like to thank again all reviewers for their very helpful comments. We respond to the specific points below. In addition, we made many small changes and shortened the manuscript a bit for this final version. > Review #1 (Sarven Capadisli) > [on https://gitter.im/linkedresearch/] I'm not sure if a change is needed for > your article, but I sense that when it talks about dokieli, there is emphasis > on publishing articles in/around Scholarly HTML, like strictly for marking and > publishing articles. [...] We make it now clear that by "scholarly HTML" we are referring to all kinds of approaches that advocate HTML for scholarly communication, and not just the work by the W3C group with that name. We also clarify that these scholarly HTML-related approaches, including Dokieli, can enable genuine semantic publishing but are not a direct guarantee for achieving it. > Review #3 (Jodi Schneider) > Scholarly communication is not mentioned in the title. Please add it there. We carefully considered this suggestion, but eventually decided to stick with the current title for three reasons. First, it is short and crisp, and therefore more memorable than what a longer title would be. Second, we think we make our focus sufficiently clear in the first sentence of the abstract and in the introduction. And third, while we clearly focus on scholarly communication, our ideas and concepts can be applied to publishing in general, and therefore our current title is even in its most general interpretation not misleading. > No data repository appears to be used for the semantic contribution. We only wanted to publish it once we knew it would be the final version. It is now available on figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5422726 > The notion of how small a contribution could be is only minimally address; > this is an important aspect of the proposal that the authors do not thoroughly > emphasize. We think we do, as we dedicate about half a page on an example to illustrate this aspect (starting from "To illustrate the last criterion of ..."). > The field of science mapping could be mentioned more explicitly, e.g. Chen, > Chaomei, Dubin, Rachael and Schultz, Timothy. 2015. Science mapping. In > Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition. IGI Global, > 4171-4184. (if this is what you mean by the term). This is an interesting aspect and we considered adding it, but we came to the conclusion that it would lead us too far away from the core message of our article (and we are already stretching the length limit). > Reviews are public, so consider mentioning reviewers by name. The names of all non-anonymous reviewers will be shown prominently at the top of the article, just below the author details. Therefore we think it is not necessary to repeat their names in the acknowledgement section. > Apologies for holding this up, it's been a really busy month! No need to apologize. We thank you for your very valuable and thorough review. > Data interoperability could be more explicitly mentioned (e.g. around the "We > propose the definition..."); it seems to me that in a "normal" science, that > data interoperability is really the point. Agreed. We write now "... in a *shared and interoperable* semantic notation, ...".