Nano-publication in the e-science era

Abstract

The rate of data production in the Life Sciences has now reached such proportions that to consider it irresponsible to fund data generation without proper concomitant funding and infrastructure for storing, analyzing and exchanging the information and knowledge contained in, and extracted from, those data, is not an exaggerated position any longer. The chasm between data production and data handling has become so wide, that many data go unnoticed or at least run the risk of relative obscurity, fail to reveal the information contained in the data set or remains inaccessible due to ambiguity, or financial or legal toll-barriers. As a result, inconsistency, ambiguity and redundancy of data and information on the Web are becoming impediments to the performance of comprehensive information extraction and analysis. This paper attempts a stepwise explanation of the use of richly annotated RDF-statements as carriers of unambiguous, meta-analyzed information in the form of traceable nano-publications.