In the last article I talked about OpenResearch.org, which is an interesting project. The ORKG, however, is one of the most ambitious projects I have ever heard about.

The idea behind it is to mark-up scientific papers, the concepts, problems and results described in them semantically, so that not only humans can read and understand them, but also machines and search engines. This would give the possibility to not only link papers to each other through metadata, such as authors, publishers or keywords, but to actually link the knowledge communicated in papers, i.e. their information content. What this project relies on, of course, is a certain amount of data, which is why the project team hopes to connect the ORKG with paper submission systems. Papers submitted to conferences or journals would thus semi-automatically contribute content, thus at last creating structured semantic representations that connect scientific knowledge and information, not only at a metadata level but also the level of content conveyed in papers.

Let’s stop here for a moment and dream a bit about what possibilities could such a graph enable. Well, users could search for actual topics, not only with keywords and through subject indexes, but search for the topic itself and get access to all related content! Moreover, graph visualization could support entirely new search instruments! Visual search through a mindmap-like structure gives a completely new dimension to information retrieval. Whatever you’re dreaming of, great times are ahead with this project.

BIG thanks to Markus Stocker and Yaser Jaradeh for giving me insight into a project that is most likely going to change the way we think about and handle scientific knowledge!

Further reading:

http://www.orkg.org 

https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/tag/orkg/