An Approach to Publish Statistics from Open-Access Journals Using Linked Data Technologies

Abstract

Semantic Web encourages digital libraries which include open access journals, to collect, link and share their data across the web in order to ease its processing by machines and humans to get better queries and results. Linked Data technologies enable connecting structured data across the web using the principles and recommendations set out by Tim Berners-Lee in 2006. Several universities develop knowledge, through scholarship and research, under open access policies and use several ways to disseminate information. Open access journals collect, preserve and publish scientific information in digital form using a peer review process. The evaluation of the usage of this kind of publications needs to be expressed in statistics and linked to external resources to give better information about the resources and their relationships. The statistics expressed in a data mart facilitate queries about the history of journals usage by several criteria. This data linked to another datasets gives more information such as: the topics in the research, the origin of the authors, the relation to the national plans, and the relations about the study curriculums. This paper reports a process for publishing an open access journal data mart on the Web using Linked Data technologies in such a way that it can be linked to related datasets. Furthermore, methodological guidelines are presented with related activities. The proposed process was applied extracting statistical data from a university open journal system and publishing it in a SPARQL endpoint using the open source edition of the software OpenLink Virtuoso. In this process the use of open standards facilitates the creation, development and exploitation of knowledge. The RDF Data Cube vocabulary has been used as a model for publishing the multidimensional data on the Web. The visualization was made using CubeViz a faceted browser filtering observations to be presented interactively in charts. The proposed process help to publish statistical datasets in an easy way.