Jan Brase

Ontologies and Metadata for eLearning

This chapter gives an overview over the use of Ontologies and Metadata for eLearning as well as about innovative approaches and techniques we developed for enhanced eLearning scenarios. After a brief introduction to the field of metadata, metadata bindings and metadata annotations in the context of a large computer science testbed we will introduce different ontologies we used for metadata classifications to describe content /topic of a resource. Finally we will discuss the usage of these ontologies in the context of the Edutella project, which represents the first RDF-based peer-to-peer network for digital resources and for the exchange of learning objects and services.

Using Digital Library Techniques – Registration of Scientific Primary Data

Registration of scientific primary data, to make these data citable as a unique piece of work and not only a part of a publication, has always been an important issue. With the new digital library techniques, it is finally made possible. In the context of the project “Publication and Citation of Scientific Primary Data” founded by the German research foundation (DFG) the German national library of science and technology (TIB) has become the first registration agency worldwide for scientific primary data. The datasets receive unique DOIs and URNs as citable identifiers and all relevant metadata information is stored at the online library cataloque. Registration has started for the field of earth science, but will be widened for other subjects in 2005.

DataCite - A Global Registration Agency for Research Data

Since 2005, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) has offered a successful Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration service for persistent identification of research data. In 2009, TIB, the British Library, the Library of the ETH Zurich, the French Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST), the Technical Information Center of Denmark, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) the Australien National Data Service (ANDS) and the Dutch TU Delft Library all signed a Memorandum of Understanding to improve access to research data on the internet. The goal of this cooperation is to establish a not-for-profit agency called DataCite that enables organisations to register research datasets and assign persistent identifiers to them, so that research datasets can be handled as independent, citable, unique scientific objects.

Completing LOM-how additional axioms increase the utility of learning object metadata

Learning object metadata aims at describing educational resources in order to allow better reusability and retrieval. Unfortunately, annotating complete courses thoroughly with LOM metadata can be a tedious task. We show how additional inference rules can make this task easier, and allow us to derive additional metadata from existing ones. Additionally, using these rules as integrity constraints helps us to define the constraints on LOM fields, thus taking an important step towards a complete axiomatization of LOM metadata (with the goal of transforming the LOM definitions from a simple syntactical description into a complete ontology). We used RDF metadata descriptions and an inference language explicitly developed for RDF (TRIPLE) to represent metadata and axioms. We show how these rules can be applied for the extensions of course metadata, the creation of views onto the metadata or metadata consistency checking.

Approach for a joint global registration agency for research data

The scientific and information communities have largely mastered the presentation of, and linkages between, text-based electronic information by assigning persistent identifiers to give scientific literature unique identities and accessibility. Knowledge, as published through scientific literature, is often the last step in a process originating from scientific research data. Today scientists are using simulation, observational, and experimentation techniques that yield massive quantities of research data. These data are analyzed, synthesized, interpreted, and the outcome of this process is generally published as a scientific article. Access to the original data as the foundation of knowledge has become an important issue throughout the world and different projects have started to find solutions. Global collaboration and scientific advances could be accelerated through broader access to scientific research data. In other words, data access could be revolutionized through the same technologies used to make textual literature accessible. The most obvious opportunity to broaden visibility of and access to research data is to integrate its access into the medium where it is most often cited: electronic textual information. Besides this opportunity, it is important, irrespective of where they are cited, for research data to have an internet identity. Since 2005, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) has offered a successful Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration service for persistent identification of research data. In this white paper we discuss the possibilities to open this registration to a global consortium of information institutes and libraries.

DataCite and DOI names for research data

The publication of research data is still not a widespread practice in many disciplines. The lack of acceptance of data as scientific output equal to scientific articles, and the lack of suitable infrastructures for the storage of data make it difficult to publish and cite data independently. The global consortium DataCite was established in 2009 to overcome the challenges of data citation. The aim of the consortium is to establish easy access to data, to increase the acceptance of data publication and to support data archiving. The use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) provides an easy method to access and re-use research data. The DOI facilitates the citation of data and therefore increases the availability and acknowledgement of research data.

Webservices infrastructure for the registration of scientific primary data

Registration of scientific primary data, to make these data citable as a unique piece of work and not only a part of a publication, has always been an important issue. In the context of the project ”Publication and Citation of Scientific Primary Data” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) has become the first registration agency worldwide for scientific primary data. Registration has started for the field of earth science, but will be widened for other subjects in the future. This paper shall give an overview about the technical realization of this important usage field for a digital library.

Making Data Citeable: DataCite

In 2005 the German National Library of Science and Technology started assigning DOI names to datasets to allow stabile linking between articles and data. In 2009 this work lead to the funding of DataCite, a global consortium of libraries and information institutions with the aim to enable scientists to use datasets as independently published records that can be shared, referenced and cited.

Information supply beyond text: non‐textual information at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) – challenges and planning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the work being done at The German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) to make non‐textual information, for example three dimensional objects, more easily accessible. The goal is to create workflows and develop tools that allow academic libraries to treat this data in the same way as textual documents within the library processing chain. This implies content‐based indexing and the offering of new kinds of interfaces for searching and displaying results.Design/methodology/approach – The work of TIB on non textual information is described as well as DataCite and its launch in December 2009.Findings – That the launch of Datacite ensures that this agency will take global leadership for promoting the use of persistent identifiers for datasets, to satisfy the needs of scientists. It will, through its members, establish and promote common methods, best practices, and guidance.Practical implications – The work of TIB and the launch of Datacite will en...

ODIN: the ORCID and DataCite interoperability network

Research data is increasingly seen as the most significant untapped resource in scholarship. Awareness and practice of referencing and citing research data is increasing, and different initiatives to unambiguously identify datasets are in place. Steps are being taken to identify the individuals who created or contributed to research outputs. Lack of interoperability between the different initiatives to identify datasets and contributors remains a major hurdle. The ODIN project (ORCID and DataCite Interoperability Network) tries to address this need. ODIN builds on the ORCID and DataCite initiatives to uniquely identify scientists and data sets and connect this information across multiple services and infrastructures. It aims to address some of the critical open questions in the area. We describe a conceptual model to solve the interoperability between different identifiers for data and people.