Advancing Scientific Knowledge Retrieval and Reuse with a Novel Digital Library for Machine-Readable Knowledge

TL;DR

This paper introduces ORKG reborn, a digital library that enables machine-readable, fine-grained scientific knowledge expressions, facilitating efficient retrieval, reuse, and synthesis of research data, code, and statements across disciplines.

Contribution

It presents a novel digital library system supporting machine-readable scientific knowledge, contrasting with traditional document-centric models, and demonstrates its practical viability for enhanced knowledge retrieval.

Findings

Supports finding scientific statements by data, code, and constraints

Enables fine-grained, reproducible knowledge expressions

Shows improved retrieval over traditional digital libraries

Abstract

Digital libraries for research, such as the ACM Digital Library or Semantic Scholar, do not enable the machine-supported, efficient reuse of scientific knowledge (e.g., in synthesis research). This is because these libraries are based on document-centric models with narrative text knowledge expressions that require manual or semi-automated knowledge extraction, structuring, and organization. We present ORKG reborn, an emerging digital library that supports finding, accessing, and reusing accurate, fine-grained, and reproducible machine-readable expressions of scientific knowledge that relate scientific statements and their supporting evidence in terms of data and code. The rich expressions of scientific knowledge are published as reborn (born-reusable) articles and provide novel possibilities for scientific knowledge retrieval, for instance by statistical methods, software packages, variables, or data matching specific constraints. We describe the proposed system and demonstrate its practical viability and potential for information retrieval in contrast to state-of-the-art digital libraries and document-centric scholarly communication using several published articles in research fields ranging from computer science to soil science. Our work underscores the enormous potential of scientific knowledge databases and a viable approach to their construction.