This document discusses exploring the UK research landscape by repurposing information gathered about researchers from institutions and research councils. It summarizes past projects like CS AKTive Space that created knowledge repositories but saw limited usage. Current initiatives use linked data standards like BIBO, DOAP, and FOAF to publish information from systems like EPrints as RDF. CERIF is presented as the common format for research information but has issues. The dotAC project aims to map CERIF to RDF ontologies to better represent and interconnect research data.

1. dotACExploring the UK Research Landscape Nicholas Gibbins <nmg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> ILRT, 2009-09-21

2. Background Much information is gathered about researchers by institutions (through self-archiving mandates) by research councils This information does not directly benefit researchers The goal of dotAC is to repurpose this information and use it to help researchers understand their communities Not the first time that we’ve gone down this route… 2

3. CS AKTive Space 3

4. not widely used AKT ontology 4 RAE2001 EPrints applications gatherers datasources knowledge repository(3store) not linked data, poor coreference screen scraped

5. Changes since 2003 Emergence of CERIF as a likely common format for RIS Spread of self-archiving mandates and institutional repositories Growth of the Web of Linked Data Recognition of the coreference problem on the SW Related work: ECSRDF RKBExplorer and CRS 5

6. Ontologies CS AKTive Space used a purpose-designed ontology Few relevant ontologies at the time (DC + FOAF + ?) Little reuse of AKT data Growth of Linked Data has led to widespread adoption of other ontologies in this space: BIBO DOAP SIOC DCQ 6

7. EPrintsRDF Extension to EPrints3 to allow native publishing of RDF as linked data RDF metadata using 303 See Other pattern Uses BIBO+DCQ+FOAF Publish extension as part of future Eprints release 7

8. CERIF Currently the most credible format for RIS, but… Not widely used Unclear purpose Poorly documented Prematurely encoded Overly restrictive Unlikely to lead to reuse of data in its current form 8

9. CERIF2RDF dotAC deliverable (in progress) Mapping of core CERIF classes and properties to a selection of widely used RDF/OWL ontologies: FOAF+DOAP+BIBO+DCQ+OWL Time Extension of above ontologies for common CERIF terms not otherwise covered Translator from XML serialisation of CERIF2008 to RDF Made more difficult by lack of real world CERIF data 9