Representing and organizing scientific knowledge in biomedical articles with Semantic Web technologies

Currently, the conventional channel for reporting scientific results is the Web electronic publishing. Despite the advances in electronic publishing scientific articles are still published in paper print formats such as PDFs. The emergence of the Semantic Web and Linked Data environment provides new opportunities for communicating, sharing, and integrating scientific knowledge in digital formats that can overcome the limitations of the current print format, suitable only for reading by people. This paper explores the possibilities of this new environment proposing a semantic model of scholarly electronic articles in biomedical sciences. Thereby the results of scientific research can be published electronically, shared in structured, interlinked formats, enabling their crawling by software agents, facilitating semantic retrieval, knowledge reuse, validation of scientific results, identification of traces of scientific discoveries, new scientific insights, and identification of knowledge contradictions or inconsistencies.