Nature Publishing Group Launches Linked Data Platform

Nature Publishing Group is trying to break into the future of scientific publishing with its new linked data platform—launched earlier this month; the new platform is designed to enrich search functions.

“We have uploaded the bibliographical meta-data for all of the Nature Journal branded articles going back until 1869—some 450,000 articles,” says Jason Wilde, the business development director for Nature Publishing Group [NPG]. The platform includes more than 20 million resource description framework statements.

Essentially, this linked data platform connects publication dates and other features within manuscripts like institutions, journal titles, volumes, issues and authors. That creates what Wilde refers to as triples.

“A triple is an object, an assertion and a destination,” he says. “A subject, a predicate and an object are the official way of describing it. Many believe linked data itself is the next generation of the Internet and semantic Web—being able to understand and create links between information that may not necessarily be directly linked. For example you can say an article is written by me and via linked data you can find out what else I’ve done—you’re starting to create connections of information by how they relate to each other.”

In a similar move late last month, it was announced that the Associated Press partnered with database technology provider MarkLogic to add a more powerful and efficient content analysis tool to its archives, as previously reported by FOLIO:.

In addition to making its stories available to publishers around the globe, the AP also has a b-to-b group that sells data access to its archive of over 500 million pieces of content. The company, however, needed a solution that offered more targeted search and data packaging capabilities on a much faster platform.

“This helps people out in the Internet in general,” says Wilde. “People would otherwise have to scrape our website for this information. Putting it as triples means you can find everything published in a certain year, on a certain topic or annotated entities. This will help libraries and their catalogs in addition to anyone out there that wants to do development work with how science is being published.”

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