Semantics-based Publication Management using RSS and FOAF

Listing references to scientific publications on personal or group homepages is a common practice. Doing this in a consistent and structured manner either requires a lot of discipline or a centralized database. Scientific publication, however, is a distributed activity by nature. We present a completely distributed and RDF-based implementation for disseminating references to scientific publications. Our application only uses existing information sources and allows for different output formats, e.g. HTML, RSS and RDF. 1 Automatically Collecting and Publishing References to Scientific Publications Information about scientific publications is often maintained by individual people. To present this distributed information in different selections and in different formats at different locations usually requires a lot of manual work. We demonstrate an application that performs this task using SemanticWeb based techniques. Our application collects several sources of information from several locations, e.g. information about publications of authors from their homepage, information about groupmembership from the department website and information about people by crawling FOAF-files. All sources are—if not yet in this format—translated to RDF and uploaded to an RDF store, in our case Sesame [Broekstra et al., 2002]. In the repository we apply several unification and reasoning steps to link the different datasources, to derive additional facts and to remove redundant information. In addition, there is a webservice that can be queried for publications based on specific criteria and in a specific format, e.g. RSS or HTML with a particular stylesheet applied. The webservice translates the request into a query to the repository and represents the data into the desired format. Figure 1 presents a schematic representation of the approach. 1.1 Sources of Information For information about publications, we rely on the common BibTeX format. We ask authors that would like to have their publications included to put a BibTeX-file with their own groups groups departments publications publications publications personal info personal info personal info RDF store inference & unification