Collaborative information management in scientific research processes

Research is an incremental process that both generates and consumes diverse artifacts over its lifetime. A typical research lifecycle may involve creating experimental or observational data using multiple facilities or instruments; refining raw data into derived data to test hypotheses; publishing and presenting the findings in various formats. Each stage of this process commonly involves support systems with independent management; this however hinders e-scholarship as human mediation is required to track and access related research outputs. In this paper, we describe a collaborative research information management infrastructure based on STFC facilities. The pilot system uses the InteRCom peer-to-peer protocol to propagate typed links between digital contents spread across repositories. The resultant linked web of data offers a simple but versatile solution to the tracking of research outputs in context, as these semantically annotated links form a graph of citation and provenance which can be analyzed, traversed or aggregated according to the link resource or property of interest.