From Software to Artifacts: Supporting the Current Scientific Knowledge Needs

Scientific papers are the current de-facto unit for scientific knowledge dissemination. Nevertheless, with the advent of the Web and is related technologies, the popularity of new types of dissemination methods (e.g. blogs, web pages and social networks) has also become difficult to ignore. In fact, several discussions are currently based on the advantages and limitations of both; the traditional paper model and these so called Science 2.0 new webbased opportunities. There is no discussion, however, on the fact that both of these types of documents are in fact used to disseminate and advance scientific knowledge. This paper presents a metadata-enabled model based on Scientific Knowledge Objects that aims to represent and capture the knowledge from both the traditional and the new types of these scientific artifacts. The inspiration for this model is mainly drawn from the comparison between the scientific artifacts and software, as several of the properties and processes currently used for software creation and management are deemed positive and interesting for the scientific publication world.