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Ruben Verborgh

Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications

Tobias Kuhn, Christine Chichester, Michael Krauthammer, Núria Queralt-Rosinach, Ruben Verborgh, George Giannakopoulos, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Raffaele Viglianti, and Michel Dumontier

Publication and archival of scientific results is still commonly considered the responsibility of classical publishing companies. Classical forms of publishing, however, which center around printed narrative articles, no longer seem well-suited in the digital age. In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. In this article, we propose to design scientific data publishing as a web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies. Based on a novel combination of existing concepts and technologies, we present a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data. We show how this approach allows researchers to publish, retrieve, verify, and recombine datasets of nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and we argue that this architecture could be used as a low-level data publication layer to serve the Semantic Web in general. Our evaluation of the current network shows that this system is efficient and reliable.

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Published in 2016 in PeerJ Computer Science.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@article{kuhn_peerjcs_2016,
  title = {Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications},
  author = {Kuhn, Tobias and Chichester, Christine and Krauthammer, Michael and Queralt-Rosinach, N\'uria and Verborgh, Ruben and Giannakopoulos, George and Ngonga Ngomo, Axel-Cyrille and Viglianti, Raffaele and Dumontier, Michel},
  journal = {PeerJ Computer Science},
  year = 2016,
  month = aug,
  volume = 2,
  pages = {e78},
  issn = {2376-5992},
  doi = {10.7717/peerj-cs.78},
  url = {https://peerj.com/articles/cs-78/},
}

Alternatively, pick a reference of your choice below:

ACM
Tobias Kuhn, Christine Chichester, Michael Krauthammer, Núria Queralt-Rosinach, Ruben Verborgh, George Giannakopoulos, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Raffaele Viglianti, and Michel Dumontier. 2016. Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications. PeerJ Computer Science 2, (August 2016), e78.
APA
Kuhn, T., Chichester, C., Krauthammer, M., Queralt-Rosinach, N., Verborgh, R., Giannakopoulos, G., Ngonga Ngomo, A.-C., Viglianti, R., & Dumontier, M. (2016). Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications. PeerJ Computer Science, 2, e78.
IEEE
T. Kuhn et al., “Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications,” PeerJ Computer Science, vol. 2, p. e78, Aug. 2016.
LNCS
Kuhn, T., Chichester, C., Krauthammer, M., Queralt-Rosinach, N., Verborgh, R., Giannakopoulos, G., Ngonga Ngomo, A.-C., Viglianti, R., Dumontier, M.: Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications. PeerJ Computer Science. 2, e78 (2016).
MLA
Kuhn, Tobias, et al. “Decentralized Provenance-Aware Publishing with Nanopublications.” PeerJ Computer Science, vol. 2, Aug. 2016, p. e78.

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