Linked Science is an approach to interconnect scientific assets to enable transparent, reproducible and transdisciplinary research. LinkedScience.org is a community driven-effort to show what this means in practice.
LinkedScience.org was founded early 2011 and is led by Tomi Kauppinen affiliated with the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster (Germany). The term Linked Science was coined in the early paper about Linked Open Science co-authored with Giovana Mira de Espindola from The Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) with a reference to LinkedScience.org. At Oxford in March 2011 in discussions between Tomi Kauppinen and Jun Zhao it became evident that a workshop on Linked Science—which was then realized as a collocated event with ISWC 2011 and organized with a big team—would be a perfect start for creating a community for opening and linking science.
Since then LinkedScience.org has grown step by step, or person by person, to include international activities (check the events organized so far), publications about—and related to—Linked Science, the developed vocabularies, tools such as the SPARQL Package for R (please check also the tutorial), and already one sub community, that of spatial@linkedscience to illustrate the benefits and results of linking science.
Having said this, it is important to emphasize that LinkedScience.org is–and will be–a result of many people and projects contributing to it. Linked Open Data University of Muenster (LODUM) -project initiated by Werner Kuhn and coordinated by Carsten Keßler essentially shares many of the goals and people of LinkedScience.org, and provides basic funding for it. Moreover, LinkedScience.org is also a product of The International Research Training Group for Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information having Tomi Kauppinen as the post-doc.
LinkedScience.org is very much about joining forces: collaboration with Willem van Hage from Vrije Universiteit has already produced the SPARQL Package for R, and with Ben Gräler a tutorial on how to use it for analyzing spatiotemporal deforestation data. Many other collaboration activities and people should of course be mentioned (and also will be!). We look forward to start new projects and community-efforts under the flag of LinkedScience.org.
With these ideas in mind, please contact us at Tomi . Kauppinen @ uni-muenster . de for more information.