A Quick Overview of Altmetrics

This past Tuesday, I had the opportunity to give a webinar for Elsevier Labs giving an overview of altmetrics. It was a fun opportunity to talk to people who have a great chance to influence the next generation of academic measurement. The slides are embedded below.

At the VU, we are also working with Elsevier Labs on the Data2Semantics project where we are trying to enrich data with additional machine understandable metadata. How does this relate to metrics? I believe that metrics (access, usage, etc) can be e a key piece of additional semantics for datasets. I’m keen to see how metrics can make our data more useful, findable and understandable.

 

Altmetrics Overview

Using Provenance in the Semantic Web – JWS Special Issue

The Journal of Web Semantics recently published a special issue on Using Provenance in the Semantic Web edited by myself and Yolanda Gil. (Vol 9, No 2 (2011)). All articles are available on the journal’s preprint server.

The issue highlights top research at the intersection of provenance and the Semantic Web. The papers addressed a range of topics including:

• tracking provenance of DBpedia back to the underlying Wikipedia edits [Orlandi & Passant];
• how to enable reproducibility using Semantic techniques [Moreau];
• how to use provenance to effectively reason over large amounts (1 billion triples) of messy data [Bonatti et al.]; and
• how to begin to capture semantically the intent of scientists [Pignotti et al.].

 Our editorial highlights a common thread between the papers and sums them up as follows:

A common thread through these papers is the use of already existing provenance ontologies. As the community comes to an increasing agreement on the commonalities of provenance representations through efforts such as the W3C Provenance Working Group, this will further enable new research on the use of provenance. This continues the fruitful interaction between standardization and research that is one of the hallmarks of the Semantic Web.

Overall, this set of papers demonstrates the latest approaches to enabling a Web that provides rich descriptions of how, when, where and why Web resources are produced and shows the sorts of reasoning and applications that these provenance descriptions make possible

Finally, it’s important to note that this issue wouldn’t have been possible without the quick and competent reviews done by the anonymous reviewers. This is my public thank you to them.

I hope you take a chance to take a look at this interesting work.