Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge

What will researchers be publishing in the future? Whilst there is little question that the Web will be the publication platform, as scholars move away from paper towards digital content, there is a need for mechanisms that support the production of self-contained units of knowledge and facilitate the publication, sharing and reuse of such entities.

 In this paper we discuss the notion of _research objects_, semantically rich aggregations of resources, that can possess some scientific intent or support some research objective. We present a number of principles that we expect such objects and their associated services to follow

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

myExperiment: An ontology for e-Research

myExperiment describes itself as a "Social Virtual Research Environment" that provides the ability to share Research Objects (ROs) over a social infrastructure to facilitate actioning of research. The myExperiment Ontology is a logical representation of the data model used by this environment, allowing its data to be published in a standard RDF format, whilst providing a generic extensible framework that can be reused by similar projects. ROs are data structures designed to semantically enhance research publications by capturing and preserving the research method so that it can be reproduced in the future. This paper provides some motivation for an RO specification and briefly considers how existing domain-specifific ontologies might be integrated. It concludes by discussing the future direction of the myExperiment Ontology and how it will best support these ROs

Science Bots: a Model for the Future of Scientific Computation?

As a response to the trends of the increasing importance of computational approaches and the accelerating pace in science, I propose in this position paper to establish the concept of "science bots" that autonomously perform programmed tasks on input data they encounter and immediately publish the results. We can let such bots participate in a reputation system together with human users, meaning that bots and humans get positive or negative feedback by other participants. Positive reputation given to these bots would also shine on their owners, motivating them to contribute to this system, while negative reputation will allow us to filter out low-quality data, which is inevitable in an open and decentralized system.Comment: WWW 2015 Companion, May 18-22, 2015, Florence, Ital

Scientific Social Objects: The Social Objects and Multidimensional Network of the myExperiment Website

Scientific research is increasingly conducted digitally and online, and consequently we are seeing the emergence of new digital objects shared as part of the conduct and discourse of science. These Scientific Social Objects are more than lumps of domain-specific data: they may comprise multiple components which can also be shared separately and independently, and some contain descriptions of scientific processes from which new objects will be generated. Using the myExperiment social website as a case study we explore Scientific Social Objects and discuss their evolution

(En)gendering Romanticism: A Study of Charlotte Bronte\u27s Novels

Through her writing, Charlotte Bronte takes issue both with the masculinist assumption of Romanticism and the limitations of the conventional woman\u27s novel. Bronte was drawn to Romanticism for its elevation of subjectivity, the poet\u27s creative imagination, and emotional intensity, as well as its representation of the questing spirit in pursuit of self-definition and transcendence. She also appreciated the Romantics\u27 recognition of the limits of expression and the fields of interpretation opened up by the lack of fixity which is emphasized by Romantic irony. Yet, writing as a Romantic also presented an obstacle to Bronte as a woman writer, for the poets who shaped the literary movement wrote from a male perspective which excluded women from the center of the Romantic experience. Nevertheless, Bronte succeeded in synthesizing her Romanticism and her feminism, her individualistic spirit, and social conscience by infusing the Romantic spirit into the heroines of her novels. Tracing the development of her writing by marking the progression from the juvenilia to the novels demonstrates that Bronte advances as both a Romantic and a woman writer. The key to this double advancement is the evolution of the Bronte heroine. Women in Bronte\u27s novels are not the passive mirror image of the male found in Romantic poetry but a female version of the Romantic hero. Bronte\u27s feminized Romanticism emerges over the course of her writing. She commences with the assumption maintained by the literary attitude of the early nineteenth century, that only a male voice could articulate a Romantic perspective. Though, from the outset, she adopts a male guise for writing, her female voice is heard through her heroines, and the female point of view becomes more pronounced with each succeeding work. Ultimately, Bronte\u27s Romanticism and feminism merged in a synthesis that engendered a new range for the novel, as well as Romanticism

Claiming national identity

Using data from the British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys 2006, this article examines the willingness of people living and born in England and Scotland to accept or reject claims to national identity made by those living in but not born in the appropriate territory. It compares the way claims employing key markers, notably birthplace, accent, parentage, and 'race' are received in the two countries. It is a significant finding that the results for the two countries do not differ greatly. National identity, thinking of oneself as 'exclusively national', is the critical criterion explaining the extent to which respondents reject claims, while there is a modest educational effect, if the respondent does not have a university degree. National identity is not to be equated with citizenship but involves cultural markers of birth, ancestry, and accent as well as residence. Understanding how people identify and use markers of national identity is not as straightforward as politicians in particular believe and imply

National identity and social inclusion

In terms of our national identity who we are and are judged to be in a particular context depends on how well our claims are regarded by those around us. Being considered not 'one of us' means being an outsider whether one wants to be or not. National identity may lead ultimately to social inclusion or exclusion. Using mainly 2005 survey data, this paper explores cultural markers such as ethnicity, birthplace, residence, accent and ancestry regarding claims to be 'Scottish'. It shows that being born in Scotland enables people to make claims and to have them accepted. Claims to be Scottish by a white and a non-white person on the basis of various markers are received in much the same way. The cultural markers which people use to judge claims represent the raw materials of identity differences with the potential to become the basis of social exclusion under appropriate conditions