Linkflows: Enabling a web of linked semantic publishing workflows

Abstract

In recent decades, the prevalence of the Internet and Semantic Web technologies has shifted the traditional scientific journal publishing framework towards the digital environment. In support of this, ontologies on digital publishing and new forms of granular provenance modeling have been built to support digital publishing. These fine-grained technologies facilitate the decomposition of traditional science articles in constituent machine-readable parts that are linked not only with one another, but also to other related fine-grained parts of knowledge on the Web following the Linked Data principles. However, these resulting digital artifacts of fine-grained knowledge are static objects that do not take dynamic processes, or scientific workflows, into account. Additionally, scientific workflows are important because they directly produce and consume digital artifacts. In this project, we enable the decentralized execution of scientific workflows of digital artifacts across platforms such that individual steps of single workflows can be distributed. By considering these scientific workflows, we can further find new dimensions with respect to the quality and impact of digital artifacts. In our preliminary results we have developed a model that is able to support Linked Data Notifications to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.