About the project / Overview

More and more, semantic networks will assist and even partly replace classical text-based reading and discovery processes.

Objective

The purpose of our research project is to create the means to realize a scientific electronic publishing environment that is not static and linear, but dynamic and multidimensional and which allows the visualization of cognitive and semantic relational patterns.

Main focus of activities in meta-analysis and content structuring

Domain focus

Milestones and deliverables

Main focus of activities in meta-analysis and content structuring

The research is based on the hypothesis of modularization of information by dissecting publications into smaller, cognitively independent units called modules. These modules - which can be textual or non-textual - can be linked in a variety of ways so that a digital publication arises with its own identity: authentic, findable and citable, but above all dynamic in its composition. The same meaningful linking structure can be performed between distinct dynamic digital publications.

The basis for the structure of the publication model is the creation of ontologies for specific domains, including the development of ontologies of semantic links.

Using new models of conceptual searching we will try to discover relationships between concepts, associations and homonym and synonym problems in representative, large text corpora and integrate new insights in these fields into the improved thesauri and ontologies. Expert communities will be established to assist in these annotation activities.

The ways of expressing ideas in a publication depends on the social, cognitive and linguistic structure of a scientific discipline. Therefore we focus on domain specific cases in philosophy (TERP: The Ethics Reference Project), the social sciences, in applied earth sciences and medicine.

One expected output is software with which scientists are able to write dynamic publications by enabling them to create ﾑsemanticﾒ links between fragments of knowledge. This widens the information and reasoning space, within which the scientist can follow different lines of argumentation. By creating modules of information, connected by semantic links, a publication environment can be created that allows the cognitive functions that support scientific debate - ideas, hypothesis, evidence, rebuttals, interpretations, commentary, etc. - to come to the surface.