Open Research Knowledge Graph: Towards Machine Actionability in Scholarly Communication

Despite improved digital access to scientific publications in the last decades, the fundamental principles of scholarly communication remain unchanged and continue to be largely document-based. The document-oriented workflows in science publication have reached the limits of adequacy as highlighted by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature, the deficiency of peer-review and the reproducibility crisis. In this article, we present first steps towards representing scholarly knowledge semantically with knowledge graphs. We expand the currently popular RDF graph-based knowledge representation formalism to capture annotations, such as provenance information and describe how to manage such knowledge in a graph data base. We report on the results of a first experimental evaluation of the concept and its implementations with the participants of an international conference.