Speaker
Mr
Tobias KUHN
(ETH Zurich)
Description
Making available and archiving scientific results is for the most part still considered the task of classical publishing companies, despite the fact that classical forms of publishing centered around printed narrative articles no longer seem well-suited in the digital age. In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. In this talk, I outline how we can design scientific data publishing as a Web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities. I present a protocol and a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, a format based on Semantic Web techniques to represent scientific data with formal semantics. Such nanopublications can be made verifiable and immutable by applying cryptographic methods with identifiers called Trusty URIs. I show how this approach allows researchers to produce, publish, retrieve, address, verify, and recombine datasets and their individual nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and I discuss how the current small network can grow to handle the large amounts of structured data that modern science is producing and consuming.
