Regular reader of this blog will be aware of our efforts to promote data citation using digital object identifiers (DOIs), and this week, alongside Rebecca Lawrence from F1000 Research and Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre, our Editor in Chief Laurie Goodman has a correspondence in Nature strongly making this case.

DataCite is an international organization responsible for the DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) issued for research datasets.  For each DOI issued, DataCite requires the data publisher to create and submit to DataCite descriptive metadata that can aid resource discovery.

The purpose of mapping DataCite metadata elements to ontology terms is to enable DataCite metadata to be published in RDF as Open Linked Data, enabling these metadata to be understood programmatically and integrated automatically with similar data from elsewhere.

In a previous blog post, I described the work that Silvio Peroni and I undertook in May 2011 to map the main terms from the DataCite Metadata Kernel v2.0 to RDF. To enable that, we created a ‘proto-ontology’, the DataCite Ontology version 0.2, that contained just the following four object properties: *

The worm that turned (epigenetics) GigaDB, GigaScience ’s associated database, has had a number of new datasets just added, many for data types previously not hosted. Today marks the publication of new research in our sister BMC journal Genome Biology shaking up the epigenetics field by shattering the assumption that DNA methylation is absent in nematodes.

Readers of this blog will be well versed on our and others work using DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to cite data, and this months DataCite summer meeting in Copenhagen was a good opportunity to take stock of the many recent developments in the area of data publication, with the last six months being particularly busy with the number of new data platforms and data journals announced.

Bibliographic references are the links that knit together independent scholarly endeavours.

Today marks the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, and as we enter the supposedly auspicious year of the Dragon now is a good opportunity to look towards developments in the nascent field of data publication over the upcoming year. This week marked important announcements of new and improved data publication platforms.

To accompany today’s publication in D-Lib Magazine of the article The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles – a framework for article evaluation highlighted in the previous post, I have today also published The Five Stars Ontology, a simple ontology written in OWL 2 DL that forms part of SPAR, a suite of Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies.

I recently posted a brief description of  an article entitled The Five Stars of Journal Articles, pointing to a preprint of this article in Nature Preceedings .