Supporting Open Collaboration in Science through Explicit and Linked Semantic Description of Processes

The Web was originally developed to support collaboration in science. Although scientists benefit from many forms of collaboration on the Web (e.g., blogs, wikis, forums, code sharing, etc.), most collaborative projects are coordinated over email, phone calls, and in-person meetings. Our goal is to develop a collaborative infrastructure for scientists to work on complex science questions that require multi-disciplinary contributions to gather and analyze data, that cannot occur without significant coordination to synthesize findings, and that grow organically to accommodate new contributors as needed as the work evolves over time. Our approach is to develop an organic data science framework based on a task-centered organization of the collaboration, includes principles from social sciences for successful on-line communities, and exposes an open science process. Our approach is implemented as an extension of a semantic wiki platform, and captures formal representations of task decomposition structures, relations between tasks and users, and other properties of tasks, data, and other relevant science objects. All these entities are captured through the semantic wiki user interface, represented as semantic web objects, and exported as linked data.