JISC

This project will develop an approach and mechanism to address the construction and propagation of linked data in the context of research and academic endeavour. The proposed work will build experiments in previous projects (Claddier, StoreLink) to develop a peer-to-peer protocol to underpin the construction of a web of linked data. This set of semantically annotated links between data resources forms a graph of citation and provenance and the project will build value added services to exploit these features.

Aims and objectives

The project will address the following specific objectives:

• To specify and implement the Intercom Protocol so that it can communicate a range of types of semantic links between resources via a secure communication mechanism. 
• To develop a practical working scenario involving data repositories, publication repositories, open science notebooks and publishers. 
• To develop aggregation techniques supporting added value services in search and impact analysis. 
• To evaluate of the approach with the identified stakeholders groups.

Project methodology

We will undertake the following steps:

• Propose an initial formal statement of the protocol within the early period of the project 
• Develop a prototypical version of this protocol within STFC systems for testing and evaluation
• Use this experience as the basis for a wider consultation within the community 
• Develop further case studies within open notebook science, in eCrystals, and with publishing organisations 
• Refine and revise the protocol in the light of this consultation period 
• Develop aggregator services based on the protocol
• Evaluate the approach.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• Specification of the InteRCom protocol 
• Development of generic, open-source packages for InteRCom sender and receiver services 
• Development of demonstration tools to provide aggregator services based on the link graph 
• Development of a exemplar services within the exemplars to search for associated resources, to provide provenance traces, and to analyse citation graphs for impact analysis 
• Evaluation report on the integrated case study 
• Project workshop to engage key stakeholder communities, including repository managers, publishers, facility and discipline user communities, developers within the semantic web (M10)
• Dissemination activities 
• Project management documentation

Technology / Standards used

• STFC Core Scientific Metadata Model (CSMD) 
• ICAT: Open source software released by STFC 
• ePubs: Repository supported by STFC 
• eCrystals: Crystallographic Repository supported by Southampton 
• ePrints: Repository software supported by Southampton 
• CiTO: Citation Ontology developed at Oxford University 
• RDF, OWL, SPARQL: Semantic Web standards as specified by W3C