A LOD Backend Infrastructure for Scientific Search Portals

Abstract

In recent years, Linked Data became a key technology for organizations in order to publish their data collections on the web and to connect it with other data sources on the web. With the ongoing change in the research infrastructure landscape where an integrated search for comprehensive research information gains importance, organizations are challenged to connect their historically unconnected databases with each other. In this article, we present a Linked Open Data based backend infrastructure for a scientific search portal which is set as an additional layer between unconnected non-RDF data collections and makes the links between datasets visible and usable for retrieval. In addition, Linked Data technologies are used in order to organize different versions and aggregations of datasets. We evaluate the in-use application of our approach in a scientific search portal for the social sciences by investigating the benefit of links between different data sources in a user study.