A Model to Represent and Process Scientific Knowledge in Biomedical Articles with Semantic Web Technologies

Knowledge organization faces the challenge of managing the amount of knowledge available on the Web. Published literature in biomedical sciences is a huge source of knowledge, which can only efficiently be managed through automatic methods. The conventional channel for reporting scientific results is Web electronic publishing. Despite its advances, scientific articles are still published in print formats such as portable document format (PDF). Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies provides new opportunities for communicating, sharing, and integrating scientific knowledge that can overcome the limitations of the current print format. Here is proposed a semantic model of scholarly electronic articles in biomedical sciences that can overcome the limitations of traditional flat records formats. Scientific knowledge consists of claims made throughout article texts, especially when semantic elements such as questions, hypotheses and conclusions are stated. These elements, although having different roles, express relationships between phenomena. Once such knowledge units are extracted and represented with technologies such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) and linked data, they may be integrated in reasoning chains. Thereby, the results of scientific research can be published and shared in structured formats, enabling crawling by software agents, semantic retrieval, knowledge reuse, validation of scientific results, and identification of traces of scientific discoveries.