Research Output Repository Platform

Yes, I know the name is boring. We have a better name but we weren’t able to secure it internationally in time for Faculty Summit. Anyway… “Research Output Repository Platform” will have to be for now.

I talked about our efforts around the platform few months ago.

• Age of Semantics post (general post… setting the scene)
• Microsoft and Research Output Repositories (first post discussing our platform)
• Relationships can have properties as well (some general discussion around predicates and relationships)
• Merging data graphs (an example of a WPF application merging two data graphs built on top of our repository and the myExperiment social networking site for scientists)

We are building a graph store, to enable an ecosystem of tools and services. Originally, we had an ontology specific to the scholarly communication domain, which is still the case. When our platform and our tools/services built on top of it are released, they are going to be focused towards “research output” repositories. However, we are in the process of building support for RDFS. This means that one would be able to express data models and our graph store will accommodate it, trying its best to maintain the balance between a relational and a triple store (refer to my previous discussion on this) but we are always going to be storing relationships as data (i.e. use <subject, predicate, object, attributes> tuples).

We want to enable a semantic computing ecosystem of technologies on top of our platform. We are going to be looking into what we need to do in order to support SPARQL and other related technologies.

I am going to be blogging more about the platform from now on and provide code samples as well. Just to give you an idea of how the “scholarly communication lifecycle” is influencing everything that we do, here’s an example of a plugin for Word allowing you to submit the document directly into a repository, making use of a Web service.