Evolution of the Web
With the advent of the web revolution some time ago, SHS researchers’ practice of reusing data that has been largely digitized has evolved.
Scientific institutions are encouraged to publish their data in information systems in formats that can be changed and returned.
A new production of meaning emerges from the combination of these previously independent data. Information professionals can be its translators and carriers.
In this article, we use the term document to denote publications (articles, dissertations, dissertations) that include an editorial action. We reserve the term data for images, computer files from digital sensors (cameras, 3D scanner, surveys).
The term information should be understood in the atomic sense of the term. That is, it will state the facts contained in the data or disclosed in the documents. This introductory note is important because the definition of these terms differs across scientific communities.
The documents and data scientists use to conduct research have gone digital since the advent of the Web. Exchanges accelerated.
Exchange, dissemination and sharing via the web is now central to the practice of scientists and students.
In the beginning, the Web was more or less the support and vector for the distribution of documents and data in closed systems that lingered for a time under documentary databases.
This is the “webization” of databases accessed through forms for humans and interoperability systems for machines.
More recently, the use of the Web as a large global database has been made possible by the generalization and use of protocols, languages, and standardization of the Web. Then we talk about data on the Web (data network).
In relation to the HTTP protocol, the use of URIs and the RDF pattern turns the Web into a repository of information that can be directly queried using the SPARQL language.
The information is linked by URL-type relationships. Thus, interconnected data is formed. This knowledge-level “interoperability” is linked data.
Data Networks
When it is necessary to master several computer and document systems based on different APIs, it is necessary to be able to partition databases given by the data network and associated data. To have a global methodology for disseminating, querying and reusing data and information.
In the scientific world, for example, this is a standardized approach to data used to invalidate or confirm a hypothesis. It therefore makes it possible to provide reusable access by others.
In this context, open data is strongly linked to the management of scientific evidence. We are now witnessing a radical shift in research methodologies with data network techniques.
More and more researchers will be interested in reusing data. To date, the “sharing” of scientific data has mainly been done through querying databases on the Web.
This is why there is the use of multiple APIs that are more or less obvious, but always strongly linked.
This purely IT vision situation is not very accessible to the information and documentation professions.
Additionally, APIs evolve over time. Specifications vary. It therefore includes a significant monitoring at the documentary information system level to continue the dialogue with the API on which the service is based (this is especially true for APIs). It is used to determine the geographic location of the data.
The proliferation of APIs makes it nearly impossible to maintain a tool that will use dozens of different databases.
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In research labs in the humanities and social sciences, the scarcity of IT professionals sometimes leaves it up to documentarians and librarians to deliver such tools.
However, it is not always easy to understand and follow the technical specifications in the IT field. Documentary software APIs are good vectors for data sharing once they’re designed with a documentary vision, not just an IT vision.
Sustainability of Data Access
The distribution and publication of documents and structured data and the management of structured repositories (thesaurus, authority lists, ontologies) in the data network are major challenges for documentarians and librarians.
Consider a thesaurus to be used and reused online in RDF/SKOS. It should be part of the know-how that these professions offer in laboratories to ensure exemplary interdependence between archival data and publications.
It should present its scientific value in multiple documentary uses of structured data. So, in the long run it is a matter of enrichment by creating responsibilities and guarantees of access.
Who better than documentarians and librarians can be responsible for the sustainability of these relationships woven between the information contained in the documents and the data?
