Towards a knowledge graph for science

Abstract

The document-centric workflows in science have reached (or already exceeded) the limits of adequacy. This is emphasized by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature and the reproducibility crisis. This presents an opportunity to rethink the dominant paradigm of document-centric scholarly information communication and transform it into knowledge-based information flows by representing and expressing information through semantically rich, interlinked knowledge graphs. At the core of knowledge-based information flows is the creation and evolution of information models that establish a common understanding of information communicated between stakeholders as well as the integration of these technologies into the infrastructure and processes of search and information exchange in the research library of the future. By integrating these models into existing and new research infrastructure services, the information structures that are currently still implicit and deeply hidden in documents can be made explicit and directly usable. This has the potential to revolutionize scientific work as information and research results can be seamlessly interlinked with each other and better matched to complex information needs. Furthermore, research results become directly comparable and easier to reuse. As our main contribution, we propose the vision of a knowledge graph for science, present a possible infrastructure for such a knowledge graph as well as our early attempts towards an implementation of the infrastructure.