Last year, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) shared their experience in exploring how they might link PLOS Subject Area terms to related concepts outside the PLOS publishing platform. In subsequent conversations, they realized some obvious next steps with regard to linked data. This interesting information came to us from the PLOS blog in their article, “PLOS and Linked Data – What Happened Next?”

Together with Springer Nature and Access Innovations, the PLOS team mapped out a plan to move forward. Known factors that were key to the plan included:

  • The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) ontologies are already part of the semantic web by virtue of their relationship to DBpedia and MeSH.
  • Linking relationships could be established between the NPG Subject Area terms and those at PLOS.
  • If these links were to be made, not only would that be useful in itself, but PLOS could then become part of the semantic web due to NPG links to DBpedia and MeSH.
  • The world would then have another route into PLOS content.

It is rewarding to see linked data concepts being used to create dynamic web pages and enhancing the access and value of relevant content from other sources.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.