Abstract:

Semantic Web encourages digital libraries, including Open-access journals, to collect, link and share their data across the web in order to ease its processing by machines and humans to get better queries and results. Linked Data technologies enable connecting related data across the web using the principles set out by Tim Berners-Lee in 2006.

Universities develop knowledge through scholarship and research. A university transmits knowledge through instruction. In both roles there are many initiatives to openly share knowledge and resources. For example, in education there is the ORE (Open Education Resource) initiative. On the other hand in research, several forms of open knowledge diffusion have been implemented like open archives, open-access journals, blogs, websites helping users to easily create new developments.

Open-access journals collect, preserve and publish scientific information in digital form related to a particular academic discipline in a peer review process having a big potential for exchanging and spreading their data linked to external resources using Linked Data technologies. Linked data will increase those benefits with better queries about the resources and their relationships.

This paper reports an ongoing process for publishing scientific data on the Web using Linked Data technologies covering the phases of identification and analysis of data sources, definition of the vocabularies and ontologies, metadata extraction and transformation in RDF (Resource Description Framework), publishing RDF data linked to external sources and RDF updates. Furthermore, methodological guidelines are presented with related activities.

The proposed process was applied extracting data from a university Open Journal System and publishing in a SPARQL endpoint using Virtuoso open source software. Some existing vocabularies and ontologies are used such as FOAF (Friend of a friend), BIBO (Bibliographic Ontology), SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) and Dublin Core. In addition, the dataset created was linked to external data giving information that goes far beyond the bibliographic data provided by publishers.

In this process the use of open standards facilitates the creation, development and exploitation of knowledge.

Keywords:

Scientific data, Linked Data, Open-access Journals.