The LiquidPub project proposes a paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated and maintained. This shift is enabled by the notion of Liquid Publications, which are evolutionary, collaborative, and composable scientific contributions. Many Liquid Publication concepts are based on a parallel between scientific knowledge artifacts and software artifacts, and hence on lessons learned in (agile, collaborative, open source) software development, as well as on lessons learned from Web 2.0 in terms of collaborative evaluation of knowledge artifacts.

Besides models and concepts, pushing such changes requires a proper IT infrastructure to support the novel services and tools build around the ideas. To this end, the liquidpub project provides the building blocks that will enable this change from an infrastructural point of view. 

Knowledge Spaces

Knowledge spaces (kspaces for short) are a metaphor, a set of models and processes, and a social web platform that help you capture, share and find scientific knowledge, in all of its forms.

Kspaces aim at providing the models, processes, metrics and tools to support this informal and social way of disseminating knowledge among the scientific community at large and via the Web, complementing the well-established method of papers published in conferences and journals after peer review. The goal is to use a web-based system to enable the capturing of these evolutionary bits of knowledge and data, however they may be expressed, as well as the capturing of ideas and opinions about knowledge, and leverage this information and meta-information to spread knowledge virally. Capturing opinions on knowledge is particularly important. The fact for example that somebody (and especially somebody we “trust”) shares a paper tells us a lot on the value of this paper, much more than a citation can do. As readers, we relate them, in our mind, with prior knowledge. When listening to a talk we think that other work is relevant to the one being presented and often we jot it down in our own personal notes. In a world where information comes out from the web like from a hose, this knowledge about knowledge becomes essential to dissemination. Tagging, annotating and connecting the dots (linking resources in a way much more useful to science than citations) become almost as important as the dots themselves.

Scientific Resource Space

Scientific Resource Space (or SRS for short) is a model and a data integration solution designed to provide uniform access to heterogeneous scientific resources on the web.

Scientific resource in our notion is any resource that is of scientific value or that can be involved in a research process, be it a publication, presentation slides, dataset, or even blog or wiki page.

It is important to note that SRS does not own or collect actual resources like pdf files of research papers, but only links to them alongside with other relevant data (or metadata) which helps to identify these resources, discover relations between them and find those most relevant and interesting.

Apart from the primary metadata about resources (like their titles, URIs, creation dates, etc.) we collect relations between resources and social metadata about them.
Relations are the connections of different types between resources, such as relation between the research paper and the experiment described in it, or between the experiment and a dataset it operates on. Another types of relations cover citations, versioning, different facets of different representations of the same content, and other phenomena.

Social Metadata is the metadata produced by the web users while accessing, bookmarking, tagging, evaluating, sharing, commenting, and collaborating on scientific resources.

Together, scientific resources, relations between them and social metadata constitute the graph of Scientific Resource Space.

The implementation of SRS tries to solve the problems of aquiring metadata from multiple sources, bringing them into the unified model and providing efficient search and navigation between the scientific resources.