Managing Ubiquitous Scientific Knowledge Objects

Scientific discourse, as the basic unit of dissemination and exploitation of research results, has steadily enhanced their accessibility and reusability in response to the advancement of web technologies. A highly semantic enriched publication always makes its information and data much easier to search, navigate, disseminate and reuse, whereas most online articles today are still electronic facsimiles of linear structured papers, with shallow metadata descriptions, lacking in semantic knowledge and interlinked relationships between elementary modules of content. In this dissertation, we propose a Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKO) framework in terms of a theory of structural knowledge- SKO Types, a methodology for scientific discourse representation- SKO Patterns, a tool for semantic authoring and annotation- SKO TeX, and an application of SKO management- the Conference of the Future, in the context of the emerging Social Web and Semantic Web.