5 ms·

The article doesn't fully answer its title, especially the "discoverable."

stonogo 3y ago
That's be the 'metadata' section. Encouraging scientists to include metadata, as opposed to unlabeled binary dumps, is an ongoing effort.
- carlossouza 3y ago
  Metadata is necessary but not sufficient. Imho there aren't enough tools to discover scientific data.
  - robwwilliams 3y ago
    Semantic web was supposed to help long ago, and may finally be doing so. In www. genenetwork.org we are now using RDF SPARCL and GraphQL and Xapian for speedy and flexible search that can represent much of our complex metadata. Surprising how long this has taken to catch on.
  - stonogo 3y ago
    You're right, and I consider this the frontline there: https://www.go-fair.org/ https://www.go-fair.org/
  - jkh1 3y ago
    What seems to help in the life sciences is the existence of public repositories. These could be replaced by portals that collect info on data hosted elsewhere. But the main advantages are that they provide clear, well known places to start looking and they curate, standardize and organise the metada to make it searchable.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I've been thinking about that problem. I think the publishers (or maybe the universities? or anybody at the center of a community of experts really) should host an API which maps set of CTPH hashes to URL's (or ideally, CID's for use in something like IPFS). The goal would be that anybody (author or otherwise) could attach metadata after publication. Maybe it's criticism, maybe it's instructions on how to get the included code to run, maybe it's links to related research that occurred after the initial publication... Suppose you have metadata to attach, you generate CTPH's for the article, pick a subset of them which corresponds with the location you want to anchor your metadata to, and upload the pair to the context aggregator (these would likely be topic-centered, so if it's a biology paper you'd find a biology aggregator). When people view the paper, they can generate the same CTPH's and query the appropriate aggregator, and they'll get the annotations back which link locations in the article's text to metadata that, for whatever reason, was not included in the original publication. I want to use CTPH's instead of DOI's or somesuch because they don't require a third party to index the items for you, and they still work even if you have only part of the article (like maybe the rest is hidden by pagination or a paywall). You could do a speech-to-text transcription, annotate it in this way, and somebody else who generated the same transcript could then find your annotations without ever creating an ID for the speech you're annotating.
jkh1 3y ago
In the life sciences there are dedicated structured repositories. These are searchable by keywords and often crossreference each other. They are the goto places for finding data.

That's be the 'metadata' section. Encouraging scientists to include metadata, as opposed to unlabeled binary dumps, is an ongoing effort.

carlossouza 3y ago
Metadata is necessary but not sufficient. Imho there aren't enough tools to discover scientific data.
- robwwilliams 3y ago
  Semantic web was supposed to help long ago, and may finally be doing so. In www. genenetwork.org we are now using RDF SPARCL and GraphQL and Xapian for speedy and flexible search that can represent much of our complex metadata. Surprising how long this has taken to catch on.
- stonogo 3y ago
  You're right, and I consider this the frontline there: https://www.go-fair.org/ https://www.go-fair.org/
- jkh1 3y ago
  What seems to help in the life sciences is the existence of public repositories. These could be replaced by portals that collect info on data hosted elsewhere. But the main advantages are that they provide clear, well known places to start looking and they curate, standardize and organise the metada to make it searchable.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

I've been thinking about that problem. I think the publishers (or maybe the universities? or anybody at the center of a community of experts really) should host an API which maps set of CTPH hashes to URL's (or ideally, CID's for use in something like IPFS). The goal would be that anybody (author or otherwise) could attach metadata after publication. Maybe it's criticism, maybe it's instructions on how to get the included code to run, maybe it's links to related research that occurred after the initial publication... Suppose you have metadata to attach, you generate CTPH's for the article, pick a subset of them which corresponds with the location you want to anchor your metadata to, and upload the pair to the context aggregator (these would likely be topic-centered, so if it's a biology paper you'd find a biology aggregator). When people view the paper, they can generate the same CTPH's and query the appropriate aggregator, and they'll get the annotations back which link locations in the article's text to metadata that, for whatever reason, was not included in the original publication. I want to use CTPH's instead of DOI's or somesuch because they don't require a third party to index the items for you, and they still work even if you have only part of the article (like maybe the rest is hidden by pagination or a paywall). You could do a speech-to-text transcription, annotate it in this way, and somebody else who generated the same transcript could then find your annotations without ever creating an ID for the speech you're annotating.

jkh1 3y ago

In the life sciences there are dedicated structured repositories. These are searchable by keywords and often crossreference each other. They are the goto places for finding data.