Abstract
Scientific innovation depends on finding, integrating, and re-using the products of
previous research. Here we explore how recent developments in Web technology,
particularly those related to the publication of data and metadata, might assist that
process by providing semantic enhancements to journal articles within the mainstream
process of scholarly journal publishing. We exemplify this by describing semantic
enhancements we have made to a recent biomedical research article taken from
PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, providing enrichment to its
content and increased access to datasets within it. These semantic enhancements
include provision of live DOIs and hyperlinks; semantic markup of textual terms, with
links to relevant third-party information resources; interactive figures; a
re-orderable reference list; a document summary containing a study summary, a tag
cloud, and a citation analysis; and two novel types of semantic enrichment: the
first, a Supporting Claims Tooltip to permit “Citations in
Context”, and the second, Tag Trees that bring together semantically
related terms. In addition, we have published downloadable spreadsheets containing
data from within tables and figures, have enriched these with provenance information,
and have demonstrated various types of data fusion (mashups) with results from other
research articles and with Google Maps. We have also published machine-readable RDF
metadata both about the article and about the references it cites, for which we
developed a Citation Typing Ontology, CiTO (http://purl.org/net/cito/). The
enhanced article, which is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228.x001, presents a
compelling existence proof of the possibilities of semantic publication. We hope the
showcase of examples and ideas it contains, described in this paper, will excite the
imaginations of researchers and publishers, stimulating them to explore the
possibilities of semantic publishing for their own research articles, and thereby
break down present barriers to the discovery and re-use of information within
traditional modes of scholarly communication.
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