Semantic Publishing

Semantic Publishing (English for " Semantic Publishing " ) refers to all activities which enhance the meaning or sense of published content (including articles, blog entries ) or accumulate. The contents and enrichments are then usually published on the web. The concept of Semantic Publishing has emerged to various initiatives - particularly in the field of scientific publishing - summarize. The enhancements are based on technologies of the Semantic Web. This information within a text, respectively, the metadata of the text in a machine-readable format will be made available. The computer it is thus possible to understand the structure or even the importance of the published information. This leads to a more efficient information search and integration. Furthermore, so that additional services will be introduced, such as the link of an article with semantically related content.

Examples of semantic extensions of contents

The theme of the Semantic Publishing is not clear cut, but already offers many concrete cases. Whether all the semantic extensions actually provide an added value that has yet to be proven.

Award (English markup ) of entities

Elements that can be clearly identified thanks to standardized names or nomenclatures can be distinguished within an article. Based on this marking element, and the entity is associated with other information, which enables the retrieval of additional information relating to the entity.

Reflect The Web service is based on this principle. Reflect is a plug- in that can be installed in a web browser. It marks gene, protein and molecule name on every website that is visited by a user. Clicking on a highlighted name a popup which contains additional information about the selected item, which are not present in the original web page opens.

Formatting the information in triples

The information and facts contained in an article that can be used as triples ( entity - relationship - Entity; . Resp subject - predicate - object) to be formatted by the data is transferred into a RDF -based language. This allows it to provide facts and relationships in a machine-readable format for further re-use in a semantic context.

The representation of information in triples will be implemented in FEBS Letters experiment (FEBS Federation of European Biochemical Societies = ) by the Structured Digital Abstract. Abstract This includes biological entities, their relationship to each other, as well as the method by which the relationship has been studied. This allows you to not only search for the names of the entities, but also according to their relationships to each other.

Concrete application

David Shotton, a member of a research group in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, the attempt to take as many semantic extensions to an article in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal. The enrichments include downloadable XML version of the article, downloadable data sets, assignment of DOIs, semantic markup of terms with links to relevant external sources of information, interactive pictures, new arrangement of the bibliography, citation analysis a tag cloud, etc. The article can be viewed online.

Original version: DOI 10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228

Version with the semantic enrichment: DOI 10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228.x001