SCOPE: A Scientific Compound Object Publishing and Editing System

Abstract

This paper presents the SCOPE (Scientific Compound Object Publishing and Editing) system which is designed to enable scientists to easily author, publish and edit scientific compound objects. Scientific compound objects encapsulate the various datasets and resources generated or utilized during a scientific experiment or discovery process, within a single compound object, for publishing and exchange. The adoption of “named graphs” to represent these compound objects enables provenance information to be captured via the typed relationships between the components. This approach is also endorsed by the OAI-ORE initiative and hence ensures that we generate OAI-ORE-compliant Scientific Compound Objects. The SCOPE system is an extension of the Provenance Explorer tool – which supports access-controlled viewing of scientific provenance trails. Provenance Explorer provided dynamic rendering of RDF graphs of scientific discovery processes, showing the lineage from raw data to publication. Views of different granularity can be inferred automatically using SWRL (Semantic Web Rules Language) rules and an inferencing engine. SCOPE extends the Provenance Explorer tool and GUI by: 1) Adding an embedded web browser that can be used for incorporating objects discoverable via the Web; 2) Representing compound objects as Named Graphs, that can be saved in RDF, TriX, TriG or as an Atom syndication feed; 3) Enabling scientists to attach Creative Commons Licenses to the compound objects to specify how they may be re-used; 4) Enabling compound objects to be published as Fedora Object XML (FOXML) files within a Fedora digital library.